


tied on a string (indeed, general hux)

by the_garbage_will_do



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Abuse, Brendol Hux's A+ Parenting, Dark Rey (Star Wars), F/M, Fate & Destiny, Fusion with About Time, Fusion with Ex Machina, Heavily Armitage Hux-centric, Heavy Angst, Identity Porn, Jealousy, M/M, Magic and Science, Mental Health Issues, Mind Manipulation, Pining, References to Suicide, Sabotage, Self-Harm, Soulmate elements, Time Travel, Torture, Unethical Experimentation, kylux are enemies and friends and lovers and not necessarily in that order, this story contains multiple major character deaths that may or may not stick, though you don't need to know those already
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-28
Updated: 2019-12-02
Packaged: 2021-01-05 03:09:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 19
Words: 73,539
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21206414
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/the_garbage_will_do/pseuds/the_garbage_will_do
Summary: Time travel is the Hux family blessing. It elevates a lonely saboteur to the rank of First Order general.Time travel is the Hux family curse. It kills with hangings, heartbreaks and electrocution— with suicide and patricide and implausibly bad luck.This is the quintessential paradox.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This story fuses the Skywalker Saga films with a bit of _Ex Machina_, a lot of _About Time_, and the Star Wars animated TV shows. I recommend being familiar with at least _The Force Awakens_ and _The Last Jedi_.
> 
> Like _Ex Machina_, this fic will deal in tragedy and gore. Please check out the tags before reading.
> 
> Brendol's initial monologue on time travel is lightly adapted from _About Time_.

**Part I**

"Stay here. Do not touch any other furniture if you want your dinner.”

Armitage was not to be seen nor heard. Real life rolled on by at the conference table in the study, adult voices drifting through the old-fashioned wood door, yet Armitage stayed outside in an empty living room. He kept his chin high and his eyes trained forward, waiting to be fetched at the end of the hour. The hour seemed endless. 

His eyes drifted first to the leather sofas matching the footstool where he was perched. He was too short to clamber onto them even if he dared to try, and he was too short to touch the trophies on the shelves, old Imperial medals and plaques all looming in his view but out of his reach. Soon he turned his attention to his feet and the rug beneath them. Though stained and worn, the rug’s design now interested him. It showed an intricate net of interlocking circles.

He bent down to feel its threads, bushy and brushlike under his fingers. When he explored he hit on a nub. It stood hard and bumpy amid the other tufts, and after shooting a furtive glance at the door he dug in his nails around its base. He worried it and wriggled it, pressing the rug down with his foot and pulling the root of the knot hard with his hand. It stayed stuck. He dug in harder, careless of the raw twinge of his fingernails, bored and vexed and dead-set on victory. He tugged at the knot over and over, flushed with exertion. At last he lost hope and gave the loose end of the thread one final pull, ready to declare surrender. The thread slipped loose, freed from its knot as if with no effort at all.

The wooden door flew open, and Armitage was caught gaping. He had one hand on the rug still, the other clutching the red string. His father’s cheeks burned red to match—

(Brendol loops)

"Stay here. Do not touch any other furniture _ or the rug _if you want your dinner.”

Armitage nodded and fell into position on his footstool. There he stayed, keeping perfectly still and wondering what anyone could possibly want with such a dingy, well-trodden rug.

.

His father called him into the family office when he entered his first year of school and ordered him to sit, with an air of even greater formality than usual.

“Armitage Hux,” he had said, “my son.”

Armitage shivered at the sound of his full name. His father used it only when he was in trouble.

“The simple fact is,” his father continued without waiting for a response, “the men in this family have sometimes had the ability to travel in time. Travel back in time, to be precise. We can’t travel so far back that we pass beyond our own birth. We _ can _ travel within our own lives, to present to the galaxy the best possible forms of ourselves.”

Armitage wondered whether his father was deceiving him. He dismissed the possibility of a prank, as Brendol Hux had never in his memory displayed such a sense of humor. Instead he considered the possibility that this was an elaborate test, to ensure that he wouldn’t fall for the flattering deceptions of enemy propaganda.

“The first of our family to achieve such a feat was Lake Hux, a direct ancestor of ours from a far older era. He was the greatest of our kind, able to loop from his present to any point in his past with the blink of an eye. The abilities have sadly waned as intermingling with other families has diluted the Hux blood.”

When his father paused for comment, Armitage promptly obliged. “What kind of powers were lost?”

“The skill of choosing the exact point we return to has disappeared into legend, and in some cases a Hux man might have no time travel abilities at all. My grandfather suffered this fate—“

“But what about mine?”

Brendol shot him a sharp look for speaking out of turn. “Your grandfather’s abilities were weak by comparison to Lake’s, but unfortunately normal for this era. He could travel back ten, even twenty minutes. He used this ability to great effect in the casinos of Canto Bight, as you can see here.” 

Armitage glanced around at his father’s office, towering grand above Arkanis’s watery ground. Though his father had remade it in the style of the Empire with tactical displays on the walls and sober grey hues, it retained the opulence of vaulted ceilings and storm-proofed stained glass windows. Against one wall was a liquor cabinet displaying a stately collection of bottles that had been sealed, perhaps waiting for a particularly distinguished guest. Above them dangled the crystalline chandelier from which Armitage’s grandfather had hung himself.

“My mother was also a descendant of Lake’s,” Brendol declared, “and my own abilities are the most powerful seen in centuries. They suggest a resurgence of the Hux bloodline. Your mother too had the old Hux blood; I assure you no kitchen wench could’ve caught my eye otherwise.”

Armitage’s mother had once worked as Brendol's cook. She had died of electrocution in Arkanis’s waters months after her only child's birth, caught near an exposed wire.

“Are there any other Huxes alive now?”

“No, I’m afraid fate has taken an interest in pruning the Hux family tree,” Brendol scoffed.

Was that sarcastic? Armitage couldn’t be sure, not when so many other things flowed in the Hux blood— liquor and bad luck and madness and…

“Don’t let your imagination run away with you, boy,” his father barked with a wag of his finger. “I’m sober and sane as any other Imperial officer.”

In his head, Armitage mused that this was not much comfort.

“I shall die on the battlefield,” he continued, “in the line of fire. I will not succumb to the foul darkness of a less glorious death, I will not take my own life and I will certainly not be murdered by—”

He cut himself off, staring hard into his son’s eyes.

“Come,” he said with a clap of his hands. “Let us see what power you’ve been given.”

.

The rules were simple and clear. Armitage had to step into a dark, private place. He had to close his eyes. He had to close his fists. He had to wish with all the hope in his heart that he was somewhere else. The last task came to him just as easily as the first three.

He waited for the feeling his father described— a tingling of the fingertips, a quickening of the pulse. He stood in his father’s closet, cleared of uniforms just for the occasion, and dug his fingernails into the meat of his palms and hoped hard as he could.

“Come out,” his father ordered a few minutes later.

He stepped back out of the closet, looked up at his father, and then looked back down at the threadbare carpet fast as he could, flinching as for the very first time in his whole entire life his father’s fist came swinging down at him—

(Brendol loops)

“I shall die on the battlefield,” Brendol continued, “in the line of fire. I will not succumb to the foul darkness of a less glorious death, I will not take my own life and I will certainly not be murdered by—”

He cut himself off, staring hard into his son’s eyes.

“You.” He granted Armitage a benevolent smile. “You’ll demonstrate no powers at all at your tender age, but you’ll let me know if you do, won’t you?”

.

Armitage paid more attention to practical details after this time travel revelation. Though his father did not discuss his own powers besides to claim they were evidence of a grand family resurgence, Armitage collected clues by looking for threadbare spots, the discontinuous glitches in his father’s behavior. Every once in a while his father’s mood would abruptly shift. A sudden scowl would embed itself in his brow. A smile would flick across his face, even when Armitage could find nothing to smile at. A durasteel monologue would break off halfway through. 

.

“Arkanis is stronger than they know,” Brendol remarked, pacing before the stained-glass windows of his office stronghold while Armitage stood quiet against the wall. Outside thunder and rain pummeled the planet, and the thunder of Republic cannons rumbled just below. “We’ll win unless they turn their turbolasers on us and boil us all alive, and these lily-livered rebels wouldn’t dare. There’s no other way onto the planet.”

Two hours later Armitage huddled in Brendol’s closet, hidden behind his father’s uniforms and gaberwool coats as if they might offer some protection. He clenched his fists and begged with every cell in his body to be somewhere else as rebel footsteps pounded closer, closer. They threw open the closet door and Armitage screamed and a blaster fired and the world went bright and—

(Brendol loops)

“Arkanis is stronger than they know,” Brendol said coolly. “We’ll live unless they turn their turbolasers on us and boil us all alive, and these lily-livered rebels wouldn’t dare. There’s no other way on—”

He leapt out of his chair, straight-backed and eyes wild as if he had been electrified. “Move! Get to the ships now, _ there’s no bloody time_!”

Two hours later, Arkanis fell. Armitage heard about it via comlink, sailing away safely through the galaxy.

.

Armitage blocked most of the Battle of Jakku from his mind. He remembered nothing but the Emperor’s cold abandoned laboratory with its coiled tubes and eerily familiar needles, and the vague outline of a lengthy battle, and the way the final cowardly Imperial escape struck his father silent.

“Can’t you go back and fix it all?” he asked, bracing to have his impertinence scolded.

“This,” his father said with a sweeping gesture at the remnants of the Imperial fleet now hurtling through space beside them, “was the best I could do. I can’t reach back far enough to make a change that’ll matter to the Empire.” 

He clapped his son on the back. “But you’ve got me, and I’ve got you. Don’t worry. I’ll fix you right up.”

Armitage excused himself to the refresher and closed his fists and filled his heart with glowing hope. It got him nothing.

.

While the Huxes crept through the edges of a solar storm many parsecs away, the Imperial military surrendered on Chandrila and signed itself away in the Galactic Concordance. Brendol never deigned to acknowledge the agreement even when he heard of it, already searching the Unknown Regions at the edge of the galaxy for a place to rebuild. 

While he had given up hope for himself, Armitage suspected that his father was time-traveling now more than ever. So often Brendol would raise his voice mid-conversation, suddenly irritated though his son had been well-behaved. Armitage always endeavored to behave perfectly, though he could never deduce quite how to satisfy his father. 

.

On the Dassal system deep in the Unknown Regions, the Empire had hidden shelters and shipyards. There Brendol set up a ramshackle shadow of Arkanis’s old Imperial Academy and informed Armitage that he was to become the best student, a shining model for the other children. He set an entrance exam to sort a motley group of young ex-Imperials into proper classes and placed it before his son.

It seemed too long of a test for anyone to finish, let alone a child so young, but Armitage got through more than most of his peers and marked largely correct answers in the process. When he turned it in at the end of the allotted time, Brendol looked it over and then glanced up at him. “They’re counting on you now. You must at all times be the best you can be.”

“I did my best on this, sir.”

“And yet,” he said, creasing it sharply before dropping it in the box he used for rubbish, “I’ve seen you do better.”

(Brendol loops)

“I’ve seen you do better,” his father said, sneering at the exam which Armitage had turned in for a mark of 61%. “But this will have to do for now.”

.

The war never ended. The Concordance meant nothing, here in the Unknown Regions. Brendol had tucked the Academy into a valley of black rock that radiated an eerie red, even in Dassal Prime’s dull overlong nights. Beyond the ridges on every side, an army of droids slaved away at all hours, drilling deep for minerals and fuel and precious metals. Armitage fell asleep, lulled by the rhythmic clanks and whirs.

In school the teachers— all ex-soldiers still bitter from the fight— drilled the next generation. The Academy’s students learned to read and type. They learned to march. They learned to shoot. They threw punches at worn-out robots kept from the mines for this precise purpose. They threw punches at each other when their lesser teachers weren’t looking. They threw extra punches when the headmaster visited, because Brendol would congratulate a brawl’s winners and comment on their promise. The most vicious would earn a dinner at the Hux home.

For years the other students didn’t dare to touch Armitage, wary of angering his father. It’s why he didn’t see it coming when a new student— a hulk of a girl five years his elder who had tested into the very highest level— passed behind him at lunch and snapped his head forward, against his metal meal tray.

The tray imprinted a line in his cheek. His whole head pounded from the impact. He gagged and swallowed hard, suddenly nauseous— whether because of the humiliation or the concussion or the feel of slimy stew dripping down his face, he couldn’t tell. He gripped the table, folding his fingers tight against the edge to ground himself. 

She tugged his collar, and once his fingers failed she hauled him right out of his seat. He attempted a punch that she easily blocked. When he tried again she grabbed his hand and pinned it behind him, twisting hard. The crack of bone rang through the whole cafeteria, still ringing in Armitage’s ears when she slammed her other hand into his brow. The last things he registered before melting down onto the floor were the eyes of everyone in the entire room, focused on him.

He woke in a bacta tank, panicking as his limbs flailed in the liquid. His hands scrabbled at the smooth glass interior, searching hopelessly for something to hold. A med droid rolled over and extricated him, performing a scan before declaring him healed. “You require food. Your father requires that you join him if you wish to have dinner.”

Armitage nodded, excusing himself from the medbay. He had never liked medbays; even when hidden away in drawers, all the needles gave him unnatural chills.

Escaping to his room, he dressed efficiently. He hadn’t expected his father to return, not when he had been busy all week with an expedition to new mining sites on Dassal 2 and 3. An unfamiliar warm feeling suffused his heart at the thought, and he found himself smiling as he hastened up to their dining room, patting his unruly hair down and then entering to find his father—

And the girl, sitting in Armitage’s usual seat at the far end of the table, by the ornamental liquor cabinet his father never unlocked.

“Armitage, good of you to join us,” Brendol said, barely glancing at him. “You’ve missed the first course, but we’ve got plenty of meat for you.”

Armitage nodded, casting his eyes down and taking a third seat at the middle of the table, head ringing like she had struck it again.

The girl ate ravenously, tearing into her rare-cooked meat with no manners whatsoever. Brendol would scold Armitage for such a display, but he simply gave her a lenient smile. “As we were saying, it’s admirable of Sadphoe to announce herself this way. One can rely on soft influence and politics, but in a real invasion an army should distinguish itself and gain the enemy leader’s attention at once. One bold act of violence can win an immediate alliance.”

He lifted his goblet in her honor. “Armitage?”

Armitage raised his own glass, concentrating on the way the water’s surface trembled in his grip.

It seemed hours before she finished her meal, bid Brendol Hux goodbye with a flawless military salute, and stalked back out of the house without a second glance at his son. Armitage stayed still and straight in his seat, waiting for his father to dismiss him.

“If I might speak, sir?”

“Do.”

“I apologize, sir, for distracting you from your work on Dassal 2. I suppose you didn’t find out until after it was too late to…” He flushed, uncertain in his phrasing. “To do anything about it.”

Brendol topped off his glass of sherry, a rare indulgence made possible by treating with the Chiss. “I was alerted of your incident almost immediately.”

Armitage’s stare snapped to him. “Sir?”

“This is a lesson for you. Win your battles. If you can’t, get good at dining with your enemies and picking your own corpse off the battlefield.”

“Yes, sir.”

.

Academically, Armitage ruled supreme, easily topping all but the oldest children. The memorization games of Imperial history came easily; he learned all the dates and battles and even guessed connections between them on occasion. Literature classes on the orations of Palpatine fueled his imagination, filling it with clever turns of phrase and sleights of hand. In math and engineering he truly excelled, glorying in definitions, in theorems and simple lines. This plus that always equals this. One divided by infinity forever approaches zero. Still his successes rarely pleased his father, who reminded him regularly that merely surpassing his peers meant nothing. Nothing meant anything if Armitage wasn’t the best he could be.

In the pursuit of his own best self Armitage traded sleep for exercise, running drills in his own bedroom.

His time came when he was in the back of the school lab after hours, deconstructing an old sonic blaster just to see how it looked on the inside. While he hunched over the parts, too engrossed in his work to watch his back, a whole cabal cornered him. Sadphoe called the shots. She yanked him off his stool and he dropped like a ship out of orbit, smashing his own skull on the floor.

He picked himself up and went for the blaster. He had only had time to remove the outer coating, so its innards were still intact. Aiming wildly, he pulled the trigger with a thunderous _ boom_, and someone else’s body went down.

It didn’t get back up.

The wind shifted. What began as a joke turned true and blazing, their hands all over him, gouging and cracking, and suddenly a new sort of pain exploded in his arm. He glanced down and found the sleeve of his pressed shirt ripped in two by a knife-edge, blood blooming down the forearm and staining the clean grey cloth.

“Help!”

No one did, so Armitage ran fast as he could from the room, throwing himself down a hallway and around a corner, arm dangling useless at his side. The pain was strangely detached from his mind, a vague throbbing that barely registered through the panic, and he ignored it to survey his options. He could run to the core settlement, but the path there was long and winding, and he could beat the others there under normal circumstances but not with the blood loss. He could access flammable fluids back in the lab and weapons in the gym, but he didn’t have the dexterity to pick the locks in time. He could—

He couldn’t.

A lowly janitorial closet caught his eye. He flung himself inside, turning on the light and rummaging for some kind of cleaning fluid, something stinging he could hurl in their faces. Part of him wondered whether there was any need at all. If he died, if any student really died, his father would surely turn back the chronometer. Brendol would storm right into the lab and calm the battle before it spiraled so far out of control, wouldn’t he? He’d throw himself in front of his son and keep Armitage from breaking anything more than a few limbs, wouldn’t he? He hadn’t already stepped in but that could mean nothing, surely in another past yet to come he would—

Footsteps pounded loud just outside.

Armitage flicked off the light. Devoid of any semblance of hope, he clenched his eyes and his hands and wished to be somewhere, anywhere else.

Even before the others rounded the corner, Armitage’s heart failed, splitting open with a strike of pain. Then his lungs seized up. He collapsed against the wall, a wall, the impact shaking him a thousand times harder than it should have, and this, this, surely this is how he died—

(Armitage loops)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The content of this story was finalized pre-TRoS, though I have fixed minor typos since then.


	2. Chapter 2

Armitage woke in stages. First he stretched out his legs and frowned, finding that they didn’t reach to the end of his mattress though his feet usually protruded off the edge. Then he noticed the whirr of engines, too constant for Dassal Prime’s mines, and the cold of an insufficiently heated spaceship. Exhausted, he tuned all that out and rolled onto his side, tucking his hands under his head and folding them together for warmth.

He shot upright, staring down at shrunken hands.

Dashing to the refresher, he looked at the mirror and confirmed his initial theory. He had lost several inches in every direction, now needing to stand on tip-toe to see his whole face. It was tiny and wretched and _ tanned_, of all things.

He ran back to his bed to check the chronometer. He had regressed five years, to the signing of the Galactic Concordance.

.

He ran back to the refresher, turned off the lights and tried traveling forward, envisioning his future self in the janitor’s closet as clearly as he could. Again his chest cracked open. Again he hit a wall that wasn’t there. 

(Armitage loops)

Again Armitage landed in his bed, half-asleep on the day of the Concordance. He stayed in bed this time, frayed by the strain of traveling. A stinging image harassed him, the nightmarish sight of another student’s body crumpling under his sonic blaster. He fell asleep soon afterwards, lulled by the knowledge that he had erased that particular error forevermore.

When he felt fully human again he woke up, remade his bed just how his father always demanded, and advanced to their ship’s makeshift study. He rapped his knuckles on the door.

“Yes?” came the harsh reply.

The doors admitted him, and he found Brendol sitting behind his desk and looming over him even so.

“Father,” he said, hating how his voice had dwindled to match his body. “I wanted to inform you that I’ve successfully traveled in time.”

His father rose from his chair, slowly, eyes warm and wet, and walked around the table to Armitage. 

“My son.” He knelt down and cupped the boy’s face. “How far did you travel? Did you manage to jump back a full 24 hours?”

“I don’t know the count in hours,” he admitted. 

Brendol’s eyes widened, and his face took on a gleam, familiar though Armitage didn’t place it right away. 

“It was more like five years,” he said, more than a little smug.

“You—” Brendol cut himself off, leaping back to lean against the desk, surrounded by star charts and supply graphs. “And where are we in five years?”

“Alive and healthy on the Dassal system,” he reported. “You’re the leader of a significant ex-Imperial faction. You oversee mines and multiple weapons factories, and an Academy just like Arkanis’s. You’re training up a new Empire.”

“The Dassal system?” he muttered. “I don’t recognize it.”

“It’s in the Unknown Regions. You’ve mapped a lot of the territory. I can tell you where the best resources are, I’ve learned so much and we can rebuild even more quickly—”

“No,” Brendol said sharply. “No need to build a new empire when we can simply go back a little further and save the old one.”

Armitage hesitated. “With all due respect, sir, I thought your powers didn’t extend back quite far enough.”

“Not mine, no.” His stare fixed on his son, calculating and _ hot_.

Armitage flushed, flame-red licking his cheeks and down his neck. “I’m afraid I can’t fix that, sir.”

“What do you mean?”

“I can’t push back far enough. It’s like there’s a wall. An unstoppable force meeting an immovable mass if you will, but the past doesn’t matter when there’s such a bright future waiting—”

He was cut off by Brendol’s fingers, branding, burning around his throat.

“You think,” Brendol breathed, “with all the power of the Hux blood in your veins, I’m going to stand by and let you doom the Empire?”

Armitage tensed, then pummeled his father’s arm, twisting to break his grip, channeling every drill he had ever done in his old future. His muscles had turned too weak. His bones were too fragile. When his father hurled him against a gray wall, they all cracked instantly at the touch.

(Brendol loops)

“Did you manage to jump back a full 24 hours?”

“I don’t know the count in hours,” Armitage admitted. 

Brendol’s eyes widened, and his face took on a gleam, familiar though Armitage didn’t recognize it right away. 

“Years, then?”

“. . . a few weeks. Five weeks.”

“So in the next five years you turn into a little liar,” Brendol said, pulling out the knife hidden under his desk. “Good to know.”

(Brendol loops)

(Brendol loops)

(Brendol loops)

(Brendol loops)

“Did you manage to jump back a full 24 hours?”

“I don’t know the count in hours,” Armitage admitted. 

Brendol’s eyes widened, and his face took on a gleam, familiar though Armitage didn’t recognize it right away. Then it was extinguished, instantly collapsing into dull defeat.

“Then what?” Brendol turned away from him, now staring out at the shapeless blue of hyperspace. “Weeks? Months?”

“Years,” Armitage said proudly.

Brendol nodded, not even looking back. 

Armitage kept still, though two revelations struck him in succession. First, this was not the first time his father had had this conversation. Second, that gleam in his father’s eyes matched the glow that always lit up his face when he would visit the Academy as headmaster and catch a particularly brutal brawl.

“Is there anything you can do,” his father asked, still not looking back, “to push back further? There were mistakes at Jakku too early for me to rectify them, but if _ you _ could take a message back the Empire would still be standing.”

“It’s possible,” he lied. “It felt like I hit a barrier, but perhaps I might be able to navigate around it or press on a chink.”

He played on his father’s desperation, and sure enough Brendol nodded. “Of course. You’ve grown. I trust you to find a solution.”

His father invited him into the forbidden territory on the other side of the desk, summoning up old 3-D maps of the early star battles at Jakku. For the first time Armitage realized there was a glass cabinet built into the side, holding the prettiest purple wine bottle from the old Arkanis liquor cabinet.

He quickly shifted his attention from that particular detail, for Brendol had launched into a speech. He identified in quick, precise terms the few key turning points when the Imperial forces had made tactical blunders; he rattled them off immediately. Just as clearly he explicated the strategies he wished he had employed, the alternate moves that would have saved them.

Armitage wondered how long his father had dwelt on what could have been.

“So you go back,” his father said, leading Armitage to the door of his own closet. “You hit that wall as hard as you can. You alone can break it down. You alone can save the galaxy, do you understand?”

“I do, sir.”

“Good.” His father rested his fingers on his head, ruffling the red hair that matched his own. Armitage choked up at the touch. He couldn’t remember his father ever laying hands on him. 

Then he stepped into the closet.

(Armitage loops)

He landed in the spaceship bed on the day of the Concordance, once again feeling like he’d smashed into an unbreakable wall. His whole body thrummed from the impact. For the first time he noticed metal lingering in his mouth, the exact taste of blood.

He got to the refresher, spat in the sink, and found it clear and bloodless. Just in case, he turned off the lights.

(Armitage loops)

He awoke in bed on the day of the Concordance.

(Armitage loops)

He awoke.

(Armitage loops)

He woke up in bed on the day of the Concordance and stayed there, conscious but too tired to move, considering the taste of blood that didn’t seem to be his. There was a Core Worlds idiom he remembered from literature class, not from one of the Emperor’s orations but a poorer speech by a lesser man. “Tied up in knots.”

“You’re all tied up in knots,” the officer had told a system currently in the process of being conquered, still indulging in hopeless defiance. Armitage was tied up in knots. His bones still hummed. The cords of his muscles had tensed up, sore and resistant to even the slightest stretch. He had read ahead in his physiology class and heard about knots where acid built up in the body, and he dismissed it as an unscientific metaphor at the time. But now he could _ feel _ the tension bunched up all down his back.

Still he forced himself to move, swinging bare feet off the side of the bed onto the ship’s cold floor, preparing to inch towards his slippers and then to his father’s study to report his own utter failure. His father would surely be disappointed. Would scold him for not reaching his full potential. Armitage cursed the damn wall, the strange nonsensical magic cycling through his arteries, all the limitations that kept him from being the best he could be.

He made it halfway to the study before he remembered the violent gleam in his father’s eyes. Hot and undefinable as plasma, it had chilled Armitage one second and then disappeared mysteriously the next.

Armitage returned to his bed. Waited.

.

When his father summoned him several hours later, Armitage got a scolding. He was thoroughly rebuked for lazing around in bed when he had multiplication tables to learn.

“Well, boy, what have you to say for yourself?”

“I… I’ve learned those tables. I can—” he omitted the word ‘demonstrate,’ finding it a shade too precocious even for his five-year-old self— “show you, when you have time.”

His father’s expression glitched, shifting abruptly from curious to bored; perhaps he had looped and tested Armitage. “Of course you have. Go back to your room, learn the next five numbers.”

Armitage fled, shaking with relief that Brendol had forgotten about his magic. Brendol had forgotten how his son failed to save the galaxy.

.

It was lucky that his magic chose to dump him at this particular moment. Brendol was unusually distracted at this point in his childhood, busily navigating the Unknown Regions. Armitage remembered that he rarely saw his father during this period, and so he made sure to stay out of the way once again. Without interference, his father once again set up camp at the same advantageous spot on Dassal Prime and turned to establishing a school.

Armitage played his role cautiously. According to memory his five-year-old self had been pathetic and helpless and desperate for adult approval, despite offering no qualities that might deserve it. He stayed true to that memory at first to avoid raising suspicion. In time, he introduced subtle improvements, producing a newly designed iteration of himself. He enhanced his speech with the rhetorical flourishes he had learned in his literature classes. He advanced more quickly through the basics of academics, eager to resume learning new material. And though he had always disliked physical exertion, he now exercised without prompting. The memory of his final moments in the lab was spur enough.

Once again his father set an entrance exam when the academy was ready for its formal opening. The questions were exactly as Armitage remembered; perhaps his father had copied the whole test off an old Imperial form. Remembering the shame of failing to meet his father’s standards last time, he resolved to turn in a better performance. He risked giving away his secret if he scored too close to perfect, and so he decided to completely skip the last 20% of the test but otherwise do his best.

“78%,” his father remarked after marking the exam. “Not bad, but I’ve seen you do better.”

Armitage froze. Given his self-imposed constraint, he doubted he had ever scored higher. 

“How much better?”

“You scored 80%.”

Armitage doubted it. He doubted it was possible, because then he must have gotten everything he tried perfect…

Or he broke his own rule in a past loop and looked at the last few pages. First anger flared, anger at that traitorous past self. Then came a shudder as he wondered what could have possibly convinced that version of him to betray himself in all the futures to come.

“I’ll try again,” he said. He could be perfect.

(Brendol loops)

“75%.” Brendol shook his head with a sigh. “You’ve tired me out to the point that I’ll settle for this.”

.

Brendol miscalculated. Armitage couldn’t outright correct him, and he thus ended up in the academic class _ above _ where he had been at the end of his last loop.

He rose to the challenge, studying ravenously, never wasting a second that he could spend reading or solving equations or running drills.

.

“What progress is your son making?”

Armitage tested the limits this time around, occasionally eavesdropping when his father entertained guests.

“He is thin as a slip of paper,” Brendol sighed, unconscious of his son lurking outside the door, “and just as useless.”

Armitage wanted to argue; the usefulness of a slip of paper could be quite considerable depending on its contents. Instead he slunk away.

.

Armitage fell into a rhythm in his own life, which naturally proved easier the second time around. Once secure, he paid more attention to his father’s politicking. He watched carefully as Brendol expanded his grasp on Dassal and the surrounding systems via diplomacy, smiled threats and the occasional burst of violence. Armitage gained an additional appreciation for the way he ruled the school, winning over his students and by extension their expat families. His father always knew exactly what to say, how to address any problem. He never slipped in front of outsiders. Armitage wondered how many loops he had worked to achieve such perfection.

.

His childhood whirled by a second time, days smearing together in one endless rush until Sadphoe arrived.

Armitage had plotted for years how to deal with her. On some days he indulged in hoping that his actions had changed the timeline enough to avoid her arrival. Perhaps Brendol would deny her parents permission to land. Perhaps her ship would be blown up by their freshly made turbolasers, pieces scattered in the void.

Sadphoe arrived on the exact same morning as last time. This time Armitage stood prepared at the door of the headmaster’s office, eavesdropping as her parents made their introductions. He had noted the locations of the three nearest pantries and closets, just in case.

When she emerged he approached, posture bold and parade-ready. “Sadphoe Raine. I’m Armitage _ Hux_.”

The moment he pronounced his surname, her look of disdain slid into interest. He allowed a smirk of his own before continuing, “If you’re anxious for advancement, I’d like to propose an alliance…”

.

She was clever, clever enough to excuse the smug scowl baked into her heavyset features. Armitage offered her the chance to tutor him in exchange for a promise that he’d tell his father of her talents, and often. She leapt at the chance. As a student of military history, she had studied Brendol Hux’s battles carefully and wound up idolizing him. To Armitage she declaimed at length on his uncanny insight, which in her opinion bordered on _ foresight_.

“Does your father use the Force?” she asked on one occasion, materializing without warning behind Armitage. “It’s the cleanest explanation I can find.”

He flinched at her sudden appearance, an old reflex he hadn’t quite mastered yet. Then he laughed and sent her off with a sharp “of course not.” It was a question he had asked himself many times, without any answer.

He didn’t dare ask his father. Over their increasingly rare dinners together he merely told him of Sadphoe’s admiration and her interest in strategy, in comprehending old Imperial protocols and perhaps even improving them. Of her hopes of standing one day at his side as his co-commander.

“And what of your hopes, Armitage?”

He had considered the question before and arrived at a simple answer. “I hope to be useful to the galaxy, whatever it might require.”

Brendol’s knife slipped, grating briefly on his plate.

“A good answer,” he said, and Armitage couldn’t guess whether he had rehearsed it. “We Huxes can strive for nothing less.”

.

Sadphoe worshipped the Empire with a seriousness that Armitage found by turns amusing and off-putting. Unsurprisingly, she jumped at the chance to be a test subject for Brendol’s new reconditioning program, a method for rebuilding a massive army without any reliance on actual clones. 

Brendol ran Sadphoe through the program, a mixture of drugs and propaganda and run-of-the-mill psychological manipulation meant to rewrite conscripts’ memories from birth and turn them into loyal soldiers, devoted as any Imperial clone. She emerged on the other side intact and utterly committed to the Empire; Brendol called it a grand success. Privately, Armitage couldn’t tell the difference.

In his own time Armitage tried unraveling the science behind cloning— by all accounts, one of the Emperor’s pet projects. Unfortunately the remaining records of genetic manipulation struck him as both vague and nausea-inducing. Using regular humans seemed much neater.

Armitage kept Sadphoe even closer after the test, his tutor and bodyguard in equal parts. As he grew stronger and more successful, he drew unwelcome attention from more of his “peers.” Yet when other students whispered at him, Sadphoe shut their plots down with a single glance. He didn’t understand how she could inspire fear so easily, not until he visited the school lab after-hours one day to recover a coat he had left behind.

There was another boy in his spot, on the stool, bent over some personal project. There wasn’t a flock of other students around him, only Sadphoe. She didn’t need help, not when she had a knife.

Armitage stood frozen, brain stuttering to a halt. When it returned the other boy’s sleeve had been split open, blooming red.

“Sadphoe. What are you doing?”

He aimed for authority, but she simply turned and threw him a sly smile. “Curious?”

He took a step closer and caught a look at the boy’s face. Armitage knew him, a new arrival who had gotten a taste of luxury on a Republic Core World before his parents defected back to Dassal Prime. This boy overflowed with stories of “prosperity” and “happiness” and “freedom,” insulting their settlement here at every turn. A few breaths of Republic-held air had utterly addled his brain. The boy didn’t try to fight, only cradling his hurt arm. 

“Please,” he mewled, “please, you don’t need to do this, don’t let them make you—”

Sadphoe shut him up with a slash down the mouth. Armitage glanced at the door, hoping that his father would burst in at any moment.

“Would you like a turn?” Spattered with gore, Sadphoe offered Armitage the knife’s hilt, an act of polite consideration.

“I dislike unnecessary pain.”

She raised her eyebrows. “Then the clever strategy would be to take my knife and kill him quickly, before I really get started.”

“How many times have you done this?” he asked instead.

“Every time rebel scum gets stuck to my shoe,” she answered easily. And indeed the boy was clinging to her shoe, begging in broken gasps in a show of supplication. She kicked him off. Armitage looked down at him, then back at her.

“Too long,” she snorted, yanking the blade away. She knelt down and picked the boy’s listless body up without any effort at all, laying him out on the lab table. As Armitage stood and watched, transfixed, she began the dissection.

.

“Can you undo it?” he asked his father over the carved-up bird they had for dinner the next night.

“Not this late.”

“Could you have undone it?”

“If I had cared to,” his father said. “But he was dangerous. The stories he told? Poison to the younger, more impressionable children. Sadphoe saved me the trouble of handling it myself.”

“But the manner—”

“What difference does a few minutes’ extra mishandling make to a dead boy?”

Armitage excused himself to the refresher.

(Armitage loops)

He woke up in bed on the day of the Concordance, even though he had lived longer than ever before on his last loop. Perhaps he was always doomed to return to this, the seal on the Empire’s fate. The rhythmic hum of the engine, crescendoing at the start of every ship cycle, enveloped him once again. It had grown so familiar.

He felt the same exhaustion creep up on him, the same headache he got every time he slammed into that metaphorical wall that kept him from reaching beyond the Concordance. For the first time a new weariness mixed itself in, an incongruent melancholy seeping into his five-year-old bones.

.

Armitage aimed lower this time. His father’s expectations had been skewed by his own time-travel abilities, because he himself had the luxury of perfecting his every moment easily. Armitage doubted he could ever achieve all his father expected, so he decided not to outdo the already impressive performance he gave in his last loop. He had pushed the boundaries far enough. 

When the entrance exam came, he set two constraints. As before he wouldn’t dare touch the last 20% of the test. He set another constraint out of curiosity. No matter what, he would finish only an even number of the questions.

“Not your best,” his father said when he had finished 76 questions, 73 correctly. “Though you’ve tired me out well enough that I’ll settle for it.”

“If you don’t mind my asking, sir,” he said, making his voice small, “how many questions did I finish at my best?”

“79,” his father replied without meeting his eyes.

.

Academics couldn’t challenge Armitage. They wouldn’t for a few years yet.

He dedicated some of his newfound spare time to the study of droid software. The mines ran through droids frequently, donating some worn-out frames to the school for physical combat practice and sending the rest to recycling. Armitage scavenged through the giant recycling heap for parts and pieced together an astromech droid, just sophisticated enough to circumvent some of the defenses on Brendol’s personal library. There he found old Empire military reports that were technically still classified, according to Imperial protocol. He ignored those. Instead he looked for resources on the Force.

The Empire managed to rob the Force of all its mystery, describing midichlorians and their chemical processes in unimaginably dry terms. They listed Force powers in a column, tabulating them like the effects of a mere mechanical weapon. Force-sensitives could shoot lightning or wipe minds or rip rooms apart with flicks of their hands. The article did mention that midichlorian counts might depend on genetic factors, but “time travel” appeared nowhere. 

A search for “time,” however, turned up an obscure footnote:

_ Shatterpoint: a key instant in time, when events have particularly profound consequences for the galaxy. Discernible by only the most talented or skilled Force-sensitives, shatterpoints have been compared to tiny flawed feathers present in naturally occurring gemstones... _

The entry devolved into a florid metaphor about Corusca gems. Armitage shut it down and dashed from his father’s study fast as he could.

.

When Sadphoe arrived, she once again crept up on Armitage in the cafeteria. In preparation he had skipped the hot stew in its metal tray, trading it for a sandwich wrapped in a soft napkin. Perhaps this was why she skipped the initial slam down into his lunch, instead tugging him up from his chair by the collar. Just as expected she dodged his first punch. On his second she caught his fist and tried to pin it behind his back.

Armitage disliked unnecessary pain. He dropped and twisted just so to break her grip, having practiced at least a hundred times for this precise moment. Then he went for her knees, stupidly left unbent. One cracked. A gasp electrified the cafeteria.

Armitage disliked unnecessary pain.

He drew the knife from the false heel of his shoe, a compartment carefully engineered and hidden until now, and knocked her out with a quick tap from the hilt.

Armitage disliked unnecessary pain.

He checked she was unconscious before he flipped the knife and inflicted a few clever blows to her system, snapping the tendons she’d need to wield a blade of her own. Once that was complete, he rocked back, throwing a warning glance around the room at any one who might dare interfere, and then contemplated her like one more worn-out droid waiting to be recycled—

“Armitage!” The doors banged open to admit his father, who according to his schedule was currently mid-tour on Dassal 2. “Leave her for the med droid. And hand over that knife, you know that kind of weapon isn’t permitted outside training.”

.

His father handed back the blade the second he came home. 

“You stepped in,” Armitage said, quietly taking it.

“I did.”

“Why?”

“You would have gone a little far if I hadn’t.”

“How far?”

His father smiled warmly. “Further than I thought you capable.”

.

The other students didn’t dare to touch Armitage, now wary of angering him. He kept knives on his person and stashed blasters that awakened only for his fingerprints around the school. He rarely had cause to use them. He never spoke to Sadphoe. He never showed off the full extent of his increasingly esoteric knowledge.

He grew older, older, outliving all his previous selves. The longer he survived the longer he would hold his breath without realizing it. He waited for catastrophe to tighten around his neck, jerking him back into a loop.

.

When the boy from the Republic Core World arrived, still bubbling over with stories of prosperity and good fortune, Armitage took him aside.

“Do you know what this is?”

The boy’s bravado fell away in an instant as he stared down at Armitage’s hand.

“A—a scalpel?”

“You’re clever, knowing that.” Armitage lifted the scalpel a little higher, watching it flash in the light. “Keep your mouth shut and stop praising the Republic unless you’d like to know scalpels even better.”

He frightened the new boy into silence, his own stomach turning at the threat. But silence would make the new boy invisible. It would keep him safe.

.

Sadphoe never won back Brendol’s favor. Instead he bestowed the honor of testing the reconditioning program on another student, a boy who on paper was older than Armitage. He seemed to weather reconditioning perfectly. A few weeks later he filled his pockets with stones and jumped into the fog-covered acid of a nearby lake. Brendol recalibrated the reconditioning drug doses.

Armitage didn’t loop.

.

Armitage fell behind. It was inevitable once he advanced to his final classes, caught in the highest levels of the Imperial curricula with teachers who barely deserved the name. On repeated occasions he failed to live up to the promise he had so rashly shown as a “young child.” The old shame caught up to him, a terror he had left behind the first time he looped— that he was born running late, running out of time.

“You can do better,” his father warned, and Armitage had no grounds to disagree.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you to everyone who has left kudos or comments so far! I truly appreciate it 😍
> 
> This chapter: Armitage vs. his middle school diary. <strike>Also Armitage pining for a dark knight to steal him away in a scene that is definitely not foreshadowing.</strike>

The Resurgence.

Armitage knew of it when Brendol still called it “The Empire,” and then “The Ascendancy” in an act of blatant plagiarism against the Chiss, and then “The Resurgence” in an act of desperate plagiarism against the old Rebellion. Even while cycling through names, his father had shifted his attention from their basic operations to outward expeditions. He wrought alliances out of their closest neighbors and then advanced to more forceful tactics, collecting worlds and resources and stormtroopers.

Progress left its scars on Dassal Prime. From every angle mines penetrated deep to the planet’s center, hollowing out its core, and still Brendol pushed harder. He drained Dassal Prime of utility until the experts warned that it was unstable. Quakes rocked it regularly. Its surface was at risk of splitting apart at a single wrong touch, like a rock splitting under the Corusca-gem tip of a drill.

Progress left its mark on him, too. To the outside world Brendol Hux presented a polished face, dauntless and preternaturally astute. Yet his gallant facade began to falter in public, letting snappish remarks through the cracks. In front of his son he flickered more and more, snapping abruptly from one mood to another, face hollowed out by haggard circles despite the eight hours of sleep his chronometer claimed he got every night.

“Is there anything I might do to help?” Armitage asked, a few hours after his father lost their fledgling fleet’s largest ship in battle.

“It depends,” Brendol replied, voice weary and uncharacteristically hollow. Have you yet discovered any magic in your blood?”

Ruefully Armitage shook his head. “I’ve tried repeatedly, but when I close my eyes and my fists there’s… nothing.”

“And you’ve hoped?”

Hope had nothing to do with it. Aloud, Armitage assured him he had.

(Brendol loops)

“Is there anything I might do to help?”

Brendol pursed his lips. For a second Armitage spied a tear, crystalline and glistening in his eye. A moment later it was gone. 

“It’s time,” he answered, “for you to get some real experience.”

.

On paper, Armitage had spent eighteen years preparing for real combat. His real training had spanned far longer. All the Academy’s exercises had been drilled deep into his brain, repeated more times than he ever planned to admit. On paper, he was more skilled, more learned, and more prepared than any of his peers could ever hope to be. He transmuted this theoretical mastery into practical success with ease, establishing himself as a promising young negotiator. 

He thus left the Dassal system for the first time since he had arrived as a child. As a negotiator his job was to sway new systems to ally with the Resurgence through diplomacy, entirely preventing unnecessary damage. In the process he received many tours of other planets— usually supervised closely by the local military, whom he took pains not to offend. Some uncultured planets he mocked mercilessly in his own head, with the increasingly sharp tongue he never let loose out loud. 

Others struck him dumb with wonder. He found unbroken ground, crystallized minerals running in veins that had never once been tapped for power. He found virgin forests where millions of unknown species coexisted in a steady balance. He found children running free, illiterate and gleeful, without any boundaries on where they might roam or any schedule to regulate their time. On one particularly backwards planet he stood a long time watching the children on the other side of his ship’s window, their chaotic yells drifting through even the reinforced glass.

“You,” one of the local elders said, wheeling up beside him in a mechanical chair. “You never found the time to be a child.”

Armitage snorted outright.

.

He was a competent negotiator. Not the finest in the Resurgence, certainly not the best in Imperial history, but competent. He became more so with every mission he completed.

“What will it take,” Brendol demanded, dismissing his latest settlement with a violent jab of the datapad, “for you to fulfill your full potential?”

He moved as if to lunge, and Armitage flinched, seized by some inexplicable fear. Yet his father instead fell back into his seat with a weary sigh. 

.

From the start Armitage objected to the mission to Venen. It had been designed without sufficient background research, and initial attempts at remote contact went remarkably poorly: the Order’s probe droids had been hacked, captured, and sent back, twisted beyond the point of recognizability. According to his father it was that elusive technical expertise that made the rogue Neimoidian state of Venen such a critical target.

Brendol had personally assembled the team. Armitage was accompanied by a hand-picked set of pilots, troopers, and engineers, most of whom he knew from the Academy. He was the leader of the mission, and with sycophants' smiles they deferred to his authority. Behind his back, they whispered about the benefits of nepotism.

He ignored all the talk and kept his own counsel. By his estimation, his subordinates were all competent at their jobs but hardly the best in the Resurgence, which worked to his advantage. They were expendable. Armitage was at liberty to sacrifice any or all of them for the sake of the mission.

The first lost her life to a laser— not even a full-blown turbolaser, but the blow burnt her TIE fighter up in the blink of an eye. A second fighter went down from a minor hit to a wing, just enough to send it careening down to the planet’s surface, knocked into a wild death spiral. Armitage’s stare fixed on that spinning ship, even as the third and fourth and fifth casualties went up in smoke around him.

A laser hit the central shuttle, and thus the tractor beam caught it before they even came close to landing, yanking it off-course. Still Armitage stayed standing, sure-footed on his bridge, steady at the center of his flock of subordinates. He manned the communications system and barked out demands for a proper diplomatic meeting of minds, just as was described in his textbooks. He received no response until they had been pulled into the hangar of a far larger native ship. There a team of Neimoidian grubs boarded, frisked him, and escorted him out. 

Armitage hadn’t planned to play any tricks, but the droidekas that flanked his escort made sure of it. They were old-fashioned robots, but perfectly effective for this purpose.

The Neimoidians ignored his repeated queries, as he asked first to meet with their chief leader, and then with some of their high-ranking diplomats, and then with their mid-level technologists, and finally with anyone who would deign to see him. They led him into an empty conference room and exited again. The doors shut on him while he was still mid-speech.

At first Armitage remained on his feet, posture sharp and clean. He assumed there would be cameras filming at all times, and a lingering whisper in the back of his mind suggested that his father’s eyes were on him even here. Once he had rehearsed his entire diplomatic script and scanned the whole of the conference room for technical and cultural information, he lifted his wrist, only to realize that the grubs had stripped him of his chronometer along with his obvious weapons.

With no clock to mark the hours, time slipped.

He tried the door and found it locked from the inside. The locking mechanism was well-designed and inaccessible. The floor-to-ceiling windows were shatterproof. A drill applied at exactly the right spot would manage a crack, but Armitage had neither a drill nor a single clue where that spot might be. Behind a sliding door was a refresher, tiny and impeccably secured. The conference room held no other obvious exits besides the vents in the center of the high ceiling; he could conceivably stack a chair on the conference table to reach them and cut them open with the blades still hidden in his sleeve and his shoe, but he wasn’t quite that desperate yet.

“What do you want with me?” he asked the empty room.

What did the world want with him?

Time slipped. He waited for his fellow soldiers to barge in for a sloppy rescue, or for a Neimoidian diplomat to finally crawl in with a raft of excuses. He waited for anything to break up the tedium of staring out the window and watching Venen’s sun set at approximately one third the speed of Dassal Prime’s. By the time darkness set in if a firing squad came in to shoot him, he would’ve thanked them before counterattacking.

By the time darkness set in, he couldn’t remember quite why he came here in the first place. The stars shifted slowly in the sky, the constellations strange and disorienting in this new patch of the galaxy. They illuminated the conference room, helped only by an eerie strip of bioluminescent gel lining the edge of the floor. 

The rest of his crew was likely dead by now, expended on a mission that might have been doomed from the start. Armitage could guess why his hosts had elected to keep him alive. They assumed his surname made him a valuable hostage. He watched the night sky swarm with Neimoidian capsule ships, their globular exoskeletons a sharp contrast with the hard gray lines of the Order.

He waited.

Expendable. That was his mistake. He thought only the others were expendable in his father’s calculus, but his father’s vision was too grand and his aims too high to snag on anything as cheap as familial sentiment, affection for a son whose blood had seemingly fallen short. His father had had the time to fix this, and yet he had hardly swooped in to save him. It logically followed that no one else would either. His eyes drifted to the vent above him, from which poison dioxis gas might begin flowing at any moment. Perhaps it already had. 

Briefly he considered the possibility of surrendering to it, but he slipped off that noose immediately.

(Armitage loops)

The wall felt closer than ever before. Still the impact vibrated too long in his bones, and this time he traced the blood in his mouth to the tongue he had locked between gritted teeth.

Armitage stumbled, arm reflexively reaching out for support before he could force his eyes open again. It hit something hard. When he opened them he found himself in his Dassal Prime bedroom, bracing himself against the wall.

He was already on Dassal Prime.

He hadn’t traveled back to a ship, feeling its way through the Unknown Regions. The ground here was solid underfoot. Just outside, the mining droids were clanking in the same unchanging rhythm. A quick glance in the mirror revealed that he had lost only a foot in height. A few strands of facial hair straggled above his lip.

At once he grabbed his personal datapad, an old model needing upgrades that hadn’t been invented yet, and tapped in his passcode. It flashed red.

He flipped rapidly through all the passcodes he could remember, random combinations of words and numbers that had happened to please him at the time, all invalid. He had a whimsical streak, whimsical and imprecise and near-impossible to replicate at a later date. One look at the chronometer showed that he was already running late to school, but his specific classes and assignments utterly eluded him. They were all locked on his datapad, and he was locked out.

About half an hour later he had reassembled his rescued astromech droid, which successfully unlocked his datapad after a few minutes of profane-sounding beeping. He grabbed back the datapad and navigated to his personal schedule…

Only to find it a disorganized mess, half in strange abbreviations that had been in fashion among his peers, half in a code he had developed for himself in a fit of adolescent paranoia. None of it was comprehensible.

By the time he untangled his own affairs, he had lost the entire school day; no one had come looking for him, but the penalties would surely be severe whenever he did show his face. He considered feigning illness. A bout of amnesia could conveniently explain all his sudden confusion. He could attribute it to a concussion from the rigorous boxing training he had apparently undergone the prior week, since according to memory he had been a disastrous boxer for years. He considered actually concussing himself, so a real injury would show up on the scans his father would no doubt order. He wondered if the time travel had already done the job for him.

Instead he sorted through his schedule, cracking his old ridiculous code until he knew roughly what was expected of him. Then he stepped into the refresher.

(Armitage loops)

Just as he hoped, he landed standing on two feet in his Dassal Prime bedroom, still on the cusp of adolescence. This time he arrived at school only a few minutes late, his datapad unlocked and his schoolbag neatly organized. The first class of his day was held in a laboratory, where he slipped to the back table and started getting his safety equipment on without delay.

“Armitage.”

He froze.

“Hey,” she said. “Armitage.”

“Yes?”

“Turn on the burner.”

He nodded and reached for the dial, suddenly aware that his lab partner was the first pilot to die at Venen.

.

Armitage searched his memories of adolescence for specifics and found none. It was all a haze of overblown frustrations and humiliation and voice cracks and acne and being hungry all the time. He had repressed it with good reason.

It’s why he didn’t remember that on the last week before exams, a girl with bouncy black curls and unwieldy silver braces would ask him to help her study. And while “study” literally meant “study” in some circumstances— as with him and a considerably older Sadphoe a few timelines back— in others it referred to something less than scholarly.

He had said yes, the time before. He hadn’t pulled away when she leaned forward and stuck their mouths together. He had waited for the magic spark, the string pulled taut through all his nerves, the life-altering revelation all his peers waxed poetic about. He had been disappointed. The fault may have lain largely in her gender. 

Armitage suspected it’d be a rare woman who could earn his interest. His tastes— still vague and abstract, pinned to faceless imaginings rather than any real person— veered towards the masculine. Not that he’d ever had any experience to test that thesis or even spoken of it; his father would likely throw up a protest over his negligence in continuing the Hux line, as if he couldn’t produce more magical children via cloning or any subtler sort of bloodwork. 

All this flitted through his head while he donned the most oblivious expression he could, as if he hadn’t caught her implication at all. 

“Sorry,” he said, “I think I’m better off studying alone.”

.

Armitage’s second time through puberty was less embarrassing than his first, by a small margin. His burgeoning academic challenges resolved themselves easily. For the first time in recent memory he didn’t have to spend half his nights jumped up on caf, rereading his lessons until they were seared onto his eyelids. Some nights he stayed awake for no discernible reason, sitting in his bed with an itch in his veins that wouldn’t rest, that might not let him rest unless carved out with a knife.

One night he overslept and missed classes and faced the punishment: copying a text a hundred times, typing it out one letter at a time. He considered looping but thought better of it.

The first time through he paid attention to the text, a manual for inexperienced technicians about the dangers of short circuits. The second time through he succeeded in automating the copying process, fingers flying of their own accord while he divorced his mind from his task, a wholly unnecessary waste of time.

Unnecessary.

That was his mistake, the last time. He hadn’t proved himself necessary, and he was therefore expendable within the mechanics of the Resurgence, merely a redundant bit of wiring. One possible solution was to reveal his magic to his father, but that course would draw questions he’d rather not answer. Beyond time travel, he had nothing to offer.

But he could see the future clear as stars in the sky if he remained on track to be a mid-ranked officer of the Empire, yet another gear in the machine. He would be sent on missions of middling importance, swapped out indiscriminately with a hundred other officers just like him, until bad luck caught up to him and he was at last expended without making a single choice of his own. 

By the time he finished his copying, he had accustomed himself to the simplest solution.

He couldn’t remain with the Empire at all.

.

Armitage laid his plans carefully. Brendol’s Empire— currently titled “The Ascendancy”— had solidified alliances with many sentient creatures in the Unknown Regions, who were in turn Dassal’s only regular visitors. Armitage didn’t dare steal a ship of his own, yet stowing away on a close ally’s vessel was unlikely to get him far.

So he had his droid hack into the supply schedules and identify an outlier, a delivery from an arms dealer on an Outer Rim planet that cared for neither the New Republic nor the Ascendancy. He verified that his father was due to be off-planet. Carefully, he pilfered supplies for himself, collecting food and weapons and goods that he could trade. 

All the while he kept turning in his assignments and played the model student. He hid every sign of his nerves, of his electric joy in twisting his timeline. His excitement that, after so many monotonous years of suffocating routines, he had finally ferreted out something _ new_.

The day dawned, no different from any other day on Dassal Prime. Armitage stowed a few extra weapons on his person and in his schoolbag. His favorite— a monomolecular blade he had taken to when he became a negotiator but had never had actually used— was stashed up his sleeve. The bulk of his supplies were already hidden in the janitorial closet near the lab. He would disappear easily during the chaos of the combat training, where students all wore helmets to hide their identities, dehumanizing each other and maximizing their own viciousness. The Academy’s surveillance system had several design flaws that he had mapped out and exploited, so Armitage had a clear route to escape undetected.

Once his peers had donned their marks, abandoning themselves to their usual juvenile wrangling, he simply took off his own helmet and slipped out of the ring. Keeping to the wall where the cameras wouldn’t catch him, he turned a corner, certain no one would miss him for hours—

Brendol Hux stood in the hall’s center.

After a second’s calculation Armitage stepped away from the wall, into the camera’s field of view. “Father? I thought you were—”

“Overseeing the new dedlanite mine? I was called away by other duties— a lucky break, it was hardly the stuff of excitement.” His eyes ran down his son’s frame. “Shouldn’t you be in combat training?”

Armitage’s jaw hung open a moment too long.

“I felt ill. I was going to the med droid.”

“I’ll walk with you,” his father offered, surprisingly genial.

Armitage nodded. They began to walk.

“Did you know,” Brendol went on in a conversational manner, “there’s a new form of surveillance I’ve been implementing on conquered planets?”

Armitage shook his head, not trusting himself to speak.

“Indeed,” he said, answering his own question. “When there are important parties who we have to keep track of, in order to preserve our treaties, I’ve been performing quick surgeries. Nothing terribly invasive; a droid can perform it in their sleep. It’s really very easy to slip in a device.”

“A device?”

“Something to help us find them in case they’re kidnapped. Or to help us blow them up in case of treachery.”

Armitage kept his eyes locked forward, still matching his father step for step. “What brought you back so early from your trip, sir?”

“Why, I knew you were going to be laid up in the medbay,” he replied. Armitage frowned, at a loss for how to explain that until he added, “With several broken ribs.”

Too late.

Armitage bolted too late. His father’s arm had locked tight around his neck, the gentleman replaced in an instant by a snarling beast, and the hilt of a blaster smacked hard against his chest, two ribs cracking exactly on cue. Blood filled his mouth. His vision went black. His knees buckled as the darkness pulled him down.

He flicked his wrist, exposed the monomolecular blade up his sleeve and drove it backwards.

The Academy had taught him well. All his decades of drills kicked in. On autopilot, he broke the headlock and ran, arm drenched by his father’s blood, throwing himself back into that fateful closet.

“No. No, boy, don’t you dare!”

His father’s hand scrabbled loud at the handle.

(Armitage loops)

Armitage landed standing in his Dassal Prime bedroom. His knees gave way, and he collapsed to the floor, arms hugged tight around perfectly intact ribs.

.

He checked his memory against a history textbook. It confirmed that the Hutt criminal syndicate implanted explosive trackers to manage their slaves and render escape futile. Running himself through a mine’s imaging system revealed the wiring, the glistening machinery and silver threads bound up in the nerves of his chest. Any attempt at tampering using any technology of which he was aware would alert his father and quite possibly set off the explosives.

He was himself a bomb, just biding time until the explosion.

.

Every day he arrived at school on time, assignments complete.

.

The revelations came in a neat triad.

One: the Hux curse was real. On Arkanis he had heard the servants murmur their suspicions, their superstitions, for the Huxes fell too fast and too strangely to escape their notice. Patricide, filicide, and suicide were common reasons. They were statistically surpassed by accidental overdose, by mad, chemical-induced escapes from reality. The precise method of death for a Hux was often slow and excruciatingly painful, as if destiny took pleasure in fraying their fates one fiber at a time before finally snipping the thread. 

Two: his father was mad, like his father and grandfather before him. It was a Hux family tradition, and Brendol was no exception, no matter how he tried to hide it. Armitage knew that now, smelled it on the snarling monstrous breath still puffing by his ear every time he closed his eyes.

Three, a crowning point centered above the two fundaments: Armitage had to wield his magic more carefully, had to keep it sharper and subtler than his monomolecular blade if he wanted any chance of a long life. He was trapped, swaddled, strangled tight by his father’s blanket here on Dassal Prime. Outright defection had failed. So had muddling along in the Resurgency’s faceless middle.

Armitage closed his eyes, felt that panting breath and the arm laid across his throat. Brendol had choked him that last loop. He did it so easily. The result of both nature and practice.

Three options remained.

First, he could lose himself in the plots of yesteryear, repeating strategies that had already failed.

Second, he could remake himself. He had power, intelligence, and time on his side. He had his father’s attention. He was well-placed to ascend so high in the Order’s hierarchy that he would never see combat, permanently branded as being too valuable to expend. He could see farther, strive harder, rip through every constraint that had ever held him back.

.

He contemplated his third option on the lakeshore.

The lake by the school reminded him of Arkanis, but they were nothing alike. Where Arkanis’s waters roiled with endless storms, Dassal Prime’s acid was heavy and nearly flat, barely deigning to ripple. It gleamed too bright under the sun, a metallic sheet pulled taut over immeasurable depths. Once when he was truly young Armitage had tried skipping a pebble across its surface, only to have it dissolve by the third bounce.

Now he stood on the sand, the glowing red-black rubble that passed for sand here, and peered into the liquid’s mirrorlike sheen. It distorted his reflection, stretching it into long dark streaks. With one step forward he could drop over the edge.

A noise caught his attention from the other side of the lake. Even at this distance he spotted Sadphoe at the other end of the diameter, strolling by with the few flunkies she had collected this time around. He hadn’t once spoken to her this time around. She and all his peers had flitted in and out of his life so many times, insubstantial and transient.

Or perhaps he’d got it backwards. Perhaps they were the true constant, and he was the phantom.

.

Brendol Hux hoped to resurrect the Empire.

When Armitage stopped to reflect on this vision, he found his feelings mixed. On the one hand, there was order and nobility in the Empire’s ideals. The Empire had shared technology and united research forces and distributed food and established justice systems to serve all the planets in the galaxy. For all his small-scale viciousness Brendol Hux devoted himself to those ideals utterly; Armitage truly believed in his commitment to ending galactic disorder.

On the other hand, the Empire’s own records of itself left something to be desired. Since the first time he had repeated classes while traveling, Armitage had never once finished an Imperial history lesson without the nauseating sense of being lied to, and even the history that made it into the textbooks presented a less than flattering image. Armitage had tried imagining himself on Alderaan, cornered by a kyber-powered ray so swift neither he nor his father would have any hope of looping away from it. The endeavor sparked nightmares.

But now the Death Stars were long-forgotten horrors. No engineering project of that scale would ever rise again. The entire Empire was broken beyond repair, and Brendol and his hopes of a complete resurrection were wholly delusional. The most he could reasonably expect to create was a miniature alliance of some systems in the Unknown Regions and the Outer Rim, systems that would occasionally follow the Empire’s lead and collaborate for their mutual good but would mainly pursue their own petty agendas.

In other words, barring divine intervention, the Resurgence was destined to go nowhere. At best it would create a replica of the New Republic, just smaller and even more dysfunctional.

This was the inspiring cause for which Armitage was to die.

Grades would get him, _ had gotten him _ nowhere. In the confines of an Imperial classroom he could at most match his teachers’ outdated expectations. He could prove his fluency in Imperial-style speeches and Imperial-style strategy. He couldn’t achieve what he— and, if his suspicions were accurate, his father— so desperately longed for.

He couldn’t achieve anything _ new_.

Armitage Hux would grow up to be a proper Imperial officer, a competent tactician and an adequate negotiator. He could master both roles, all the classic Imperial roles, if he only dedicated himself long enough to their practice. They wouldn’t shield him. They wouldn’t protect him from dying young, for as flimsy an entity as the Resurgence.

His focus shifted to a memory so old it seemed like a dream, of a blaster deconstructed and a body going down.

.

The Resurgence barely deserved his life, and it certainly hadn’t earned his death. Armitage opted for reinvention.

Brendol required technical expertise. It’s why he had sent his son on that suicide mission to Venen in the first place. To fuel his expansion he required blasters and ships and explosives, and while he had previously settled for the same technologies as the Empire, he could have done better. 

“Father,” Armitage murmured during a lull in dinner conversation. “I was wondering if I could show you a project I’ve been working on.”

His father’s brow furrowed. “Aren’t you sufficiently occupied with your exams?”

Armitage froze, projecting uncertainty. “I… I’ve been challenging myself to balance multiple tasks at once. As I understand it the ability to split one’s focus is a vital quality in a leader.”

“Hm. What have you got?”

He darted out to his room and returned quickly, holding a small black gun carefully in both hands. “I’ve been taking a closer look at the old sonic blasters the Empire used to equip officers with. They’re deadly of course, and powerful, but… limited.”

Brendol’s gaze snapped up. “How so?”

“Among other things they lack versatility. If someone’s gotten close enough to an officer to be a close-range threat, they might be worth more alive than dead, which is why—” Armitage flipped over the blaster, revealing an extra silver switch fused into the side— “I added a stun function.”

Brendol took the blaster from his hands and turned it over, inspecting it with a cunning glint in his eyes.

.

Armitage advanced slowly. His father offered suggestions, starting small with the sonic blaster. First Armitage improved the focus of the stun function. Then he enlarged the ammunition capacity. He inched forward, spending months at a time to accomplish any one task, careful not to lift his father’s expectations too quickly.

“This,” Brendol remarked when Armitage presented a full redesign of the sonic blaster, “this is the sort of elegance I haven’t seen since the early days of the first Death Star, when it was nothing but scaffolding.”

The sentiment raised alarms. Armitage should have been horrified.

“Truly, I can’t think of any way you could have done better.”

Still his heart swelled at his father’s words, filling with a self-contradictory pride.

.

Over time engineering infected him with something curiously like hope. Perhaps it was the matter of working with his hands, making something small but tangible and honest. The solidity of the work grabbed him when he started to drift, when he started growing out of step and disconnecting from the bustle of the Academy around him.

It was difficult to maintain any interest in regular Academy life. His peers all tangled themselves in the trite petty dramas of adolescence, jockeying to win the highest rank or the prettiest lover. By the third time Armitage had to watch their plots play out, he had all the endings memorized. Most of the romances would burn out in a flash. The ones who were most eager to impress the great Brendol Hux would be among the earliest to die. The boredom might have numbed him through, yet shocks of static— a common risk of tinkering with old Imperial wiring— served to ground him.

“Where have you been?” his father demanded when he arrived late one night.

There was no use lying to him, not about anything so mundane. “Around the lake.”

“Running laps?”

“Walking.”

“Have you finished those TIE designs you promised?”

“Not yet, sir.”

“Then was this the best possible use of your time?”

“I sincerely apologize, sir,” he said, wholly insincere.

.

Armitage threaded sarcasm into his every conservation, humor sharp and defiant. It was sadly wasted on his father and peers. They simply hadn’t lived long enough to get the joke.

His study of theoretical physics was likewise born from rebellion. It was pointless reading, littered with theories that were unproven and likely unprovable. Even his father recognized that theoretical physics would do nothing to advance his practical engineering work and offered no tangible utility to the Resurgence whatsoever. That was no doubt why it drew Armitage in.

He began with relativity, a natural starting point that mathematically showed what the Huxes had long known, albeit from a different perspective: time was no absolute phenomenon. It was folded with space into the fabric of spacetime, a continuum too grand, too mind-warping for normal human perception. After dallying with quantum mechanics and particle physics he landed on string theory, which claimed that all the forces and particles in the universe came from invisibly small threads waving about. Perhaps those threads stretched from endpoint to endpoint, or perhaps they bent back into themselves, forming closed loops.

He wandered through theories of extra dimensions and hyperspace and molecular displacement. In time he came to the four known fundamental forces, and the possibility that there was yet a fifth force hiding in the galaxy. For a moment Armitage wondered if that’s what the Jedi’s “Force” referred to, and then burst out laughing.

A cosmic mystery caught his eye— the fact that gravity knit all matter together, and yet some other power was outdoing it, upsetting the balance and pulling the universe apart. “Dark energy,” the books called it, before speculating wildly on what its nature might be.

These theories were all irrelevant to the Empire and the Resurgence and the petty affairs of his particular galaxy. They were only Armitage’s own.

.

He grew isolated. It wasn’t part of a grand design. He saw no particular advantage in cutting off relationships or— more common in his particular situation— not developing them in the first place. But every time he spoke he risked referencing something that he ought not to know in his current timeline. Even calling the “Ascendancy” the “Resurgence” would lead to disaster, and so he rarely said anything aloud.

Over and over he sat on the lakeshore and sought to clarify his goals. He wanted to reach old age. He wanted power, that abstract quantity that might let him protect himself and in time help others. Lurking deeper was a desire for freedom and genuine autonomy, the sort he would only achieve by bringing all his cunning to bear.

Underneath it all was a raw wild yearning. He rarely let it out of its cage, wary of being wholly swallowed.

Still sometimes it crept up with the mist at the lakeshore, enveloping him before he even noticed its presence. The clouds hung low and heavy in the winter, obscuring the other side of the lake; sometimes Armitage could only see a few feet away. In that haze he liked to dream that someone was waiting to emerge, a grand and dark figure, perhaps in clanking armor like a knight out of an old Arkanis myth. They might go on to rescue him, but that wasn’t the end of the fantasy. At the zenith he dreamt that they could _ match _ him, brash and cutting like the monologue he never let out of his head. That they’d be impossibly clever, always one step ahead the way he was. That they’d be tired and worn and delicate like he felt, swaying in the foggy lace.

No knight ever came. In time he reconciled with his loneliness.

.

Where his peers and classes bored him, research still felt new almost by definition. He threw himself into his projects, stealing ideas off his past selves. With the image of a careening TIE fighter still burned into his head from Venen, he redesigned its structure to improve stability. He upgraded it again to add a hyperdrive, and then evolved it into something new— a two-person vessel, where a gunman took on the offensive responsibilities and let the pilot concentrate solely on not crashing. Then he moved to the Imperial shuttle that had failed him on Venen. The old Lambda design lost a wing but gained a warp vortex stabilizer.

“And what do you call this one?”

“An Upsilon-class shuttle, sir. It can be enhanced with additional security measures, depending on the importance of the passengers.”

“Fine work, my boy. Perhaps…”

“Sir?”

“Perhaps you would do more good outside the Unknown Regions. Once we partner with proper munitions factories, we might be able to smuggle you out to one; they could learn a thing or two from you.”

And for the first time in his tangled lifespan, Armitage’s heart filled naturally with hope.

.

In his waking hours Armitage kept his head down and churned out his designs, efficient as any of the mining droids clanking out their cycles outside his window. His father let him dispense with coursework. Instead he made himself as useful as he could, biding his time until he could escape Dassal once and for all.

He knew all about waiting.

Asleep, Armitage dreamed of swooping ribbons of white, hyperbolas strung gracefully against black fabric. In his nightmares he envisioned the family curse taken shape, a rope tied loosely and draped over his shoulders. In the rare space between sleep and wakefulness he sometimes caught himself imagining phantom fingers tracing soft circles on touch-starved skin.

He dreamed one night of a faceful of blue sparks, yet sleep held him fast. He awoke light-headed with the echoes of hands folded soft around his wrists, and found he had slept soundly through a groundquake.

.

“Armitage, wake up.” His father strode into his bedroom one morning, jerking him from exactly that liminal space, overriding his door’s lock and rousing him from bed. “Fit the troopers’ helmets with smoke filters, and be quick about it.”

“Whose helmets?” He groggily rubbed the sand out of his eyes.

“The troopers on the Grysk mission.”

Brendol kept pacing around Armitage’s room, rattling off technical specifications interspersed with sharp critiques of his son’s disorganization. As Armitage dressed he nodded along and tried to identify why this encounter felt offbeat.

“We’re targeting their yearly rituals, it’s a perfect opportunity to impress the advantages of an alliance on them, but I’m concerned about an ambush—”

“Via their native smoke bombs,” Armitage finished, still half-asleep.

“How did you guess that?”

Armitage faltered for a moment.

“The Grysk are known for clever contraptions,” he replied at last. “Since you’re asking me to shield our soldiers against smoke, it’s an easy enough deduction.”

It had to be an easy deduction.

“I’ll start work immediately,” he added.

“You have four days until they depart.”

It may have been an easy deduction, but in truth Armitage remembered learning about the fatal smoke bombs from the mission’s sole survivor, last time around. His father had seemed genuinely disturbed by the cost of that victory, and that was why Armitage frowned now, skin dappled with red in the first glow of sunrise. The attack wouldn’t happen for another five days.

Yet in all Armitage’s observations, his father’s time travel abilities only extended back three, four, five hours at the most.

.

His father promised his time would come. In time Armitage would be smuggled out to a partner in the New Republic, to be apprenticed to an arms dealer until he could defect or otherwise disappear into the ether. But for all its rapid successes— and they seemed unsettlingly rapid the second time around, as Brendol spun schemes with a guile that surprised even his son— the Ascendancy had yet to make appropriate contacts within the New Republic’s weapons industry. They would hold off, Brendol swore, until an opportune moment.

“What are we waiting for?”

“For the tide to turn, my son.”

.

The Ascendancy became the Resurgence. Armitage suggested that his father might refine his reconditioning program before graduating to human subjects. The lake’s surface remained unbroken, unnaturally calm.

With unnatural calm Armitage inquired after his father’s plans for Venen.

“I have no interest in it at the time.”

“I should warn you that we won’t be able to replicate their technology capabilities for years without their support.”

Brendol shrugged. “The mission will surely fail if you don’t accompany it, and you’re too valuable to risk.”

“But if I were to go?”

Brendol’s eyes unfocused for a strange instant. “It’s impossible to say.”

.

In his waking hours, Armitage lived on chemical fumes and live wires. He abandoned school, cutting out unnecessary human contact, and elected to stay alone in the lab his father bestowed on him. He was untouchable there and untouched, skin warmed only by Dassal Prime’s dying red giant of a sun. 

His father was brilliant as a sun, and Armitage followed his orders and revolved about him, with little heat and no light of his own. He only had real power when his father deigned to bestow it. He had spent decades alone, caught helpless in his father’s gravitational orbit.

The thing with gravity, though, was that it only took the slightest pull by a larger body to steal one wholly away.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This chapter: Inappropriate Use of Earthquakes.

**Part II**

Armitage was painfully familiar with first-order derivatives, having endured basic calculus class no less than three times. The canonical scenario given in the Academy’s calculus problems was that of a planet caught in the orbit of a sun that mysteriously and instantly disappeared. The first-order derivative gave the precise direction that the planet would take, hurtling on its tangent into space.

The First Order. A clever name, invoking concepts of command and business and logic and structure, the organization that the Empire had aspired to offer. Armitage wondered how many invisible hours his father had spent fretting over that name.

The Resurgence became the First Order soon after the Venen mission never happened, once Armitage had at last outlived all his previous selves. The name chilled him, settling heavy on his shoulders with Dassal Prime’s damned fog. The mining droids had been relocated to other planets recently added to the Order’s collection, and so Dassal Prime fell into an eerie silence.

Armitage kept his head down and waited.

.

“Clean up your lab.”

Armitage’s gaze snapped up over the dinner table as his father managed to genuinely surprise him for the first time in years. His lab was his hermitage, a personal sanctuary of silence and solitude, and he had decorated as he saw fit. Which was to say it was scattered with approximately five hundred projects, most abandoned, and hadn’t seen a broom or duster in years. Despite his appreciation for galactic order, he had never quite applied that organization to his own affairs. So long as he met his deadlines his father had never cared either way.

“May I ask why? Cleaning it will take three days at the least, and will certainly delay the new dedlanite press—”

“No matter. We’ll be having a visitor at the end of the week.”

“With an interest,” he said, subtly sardonic, “in the cleanliness of my lab?”

“With an interest in all the facilities of the First Order,” Brendol answered, calmly sawing his meat in two. “You’re about to ask for more information, and you won’t receive it.”

“May I ask why?”

“I have my orders.”

No one in the First Order outranked Brendol Hux. Armitage nearly protested the discrepancy, but the warning glint in his father’s eye put him off. Instead he started sorting his projects, trying to identify which ones he could throw out entirely. To his annoyance he found he was still attached to all of them.

“If you’re sufficiently impressive,” his father said with a rare smile, “your work here on Dassal will soon be done.”

Armitage redoubled his efforts.

.

Dassal Prime’s landing pads hadn’t seen heavy traffic in years, but now they hummed with activity. One famous officer after another flew in, Imperial veterans whom Armitage hadn’t thought were alive, much less still aligned with the Empire’s goals. But they were ready for war, and Armitage was ready for his escape.

“We’re lining up to kiss Snoke’s ring.”

Armitage first heard Snoke’s name in passing, over breakfast with Rae Sloane. After so long he barely remembered her, only the smell of preservatives and rotting blood that still clung to all his memories of the Emperor’s Jakku lab.

“Snoke?” On instinct Armitage looked to his father for explanation. Sloane lifted an eyebrow.

“The head of the First Order,” Brendol replied.

Armitage blinked. “We have another emperor?”

“No,” Rae corrected wryly. “Only one person shall ever hold that title.”

.

Armitage had learned to float, ignoring the chaos of daily military affairs. Locked in his lab, he arranged his projects into piles— sloppy piles with no actual organizational structure, but they looked photogenic enough for a cursory inspection. A knock on the door interrupted him.

“Sir?”

His father entered. Though his steps were heavy and precise as ever, there was a fracture in his impenetrable stare.

“May I help you?”

“Sit for a moment.”

Still holding a set of galven coils, Armitage sat down on his stool as his father paced about the lab. He was reminded of being a small boy again, learning of time travel for the very first time.

“I find myself in the unusual position,” Brendol began, “of finding that my judgment has been clouded for longer than I can tell. I have underestimated someone close to me, someone I was naive enough to trust.”

Armitage’s throat tightened.

“Snoke is not at all what I thought.”

“How so?” he replied, right on cue.

“I was under the impression that he was the head of an existing force. A massive army of spies embedded throughout the Republic and the Unknown Regions, able to gather intelligence at a speed that far outpaced us. As it turns out, there are no spies. He is only one man.”

“And you’re disappointed?”

“I’m disturbed.” Brendol’s stare suddenly sharpened, turning its laser focus on Armitage. “As you should be.”

He caught on a second later. “He’s your intelligence source.”

“He’s only one man,” Brendol repeated, stuck on the point.

“A Force-user, then? One powerful enough to—”

“To pull the wool over my eyes,” he finished, the right angles of his frame all tilting slightly out of alignment. “And I’ve been summoned to see him.”

“What happens if he—” Armitage cut himself off, suddenly fearful that Snoke might be watching them even here.

“If he cherishes a curiosity about our family’s fortunes?” Brendol said wryly, as if they might be hiding only a shameful estate debt.

Armitage nodded.

“I encourage you to use your imagination.”

Clones. Clones were the first to leap to mind, a concept Armitage had joked about in the past. It was no longer funny— an army of time-traveling Hux clones, genetically fine-tuned to optimize their magic, in the hands of a potentially unhinged Force-sensitive who had already shown a disregard for the First Order’s structure.

“Can we…” Armitage trailed off and let his eyes trail out the window, up towards the star-dusted sky that beckoned beyond Dassal’s sun.

“You’ve been fitted with a tracker.”

“I found it on a scan,” Armitage said, yielding that secret. “I assumed it was there for security, in case of an abduction.”

“That’s the reason Snoke gave me,” Brendol murmured, stare fading into a distant, foggy look. “When he persuaded me to fit myself with one last year. He claimed we were difficult for him to track precisely using his...other methods.”

Armitage’s own stare fell down on the galven coils, now gripped too tight by his whitening fingers. “You worked with Lord Vader and the Emperor.”

“On the same ship, from time to time.”

And that was something that had puzzled Armitage for years, though he never thought the answer would be relevant to him; he had calculated the chances that he’d land in proximity to another era-defining dark lord and found they approached zero. “I heard they were capable of plucking any thought they liked from any subordinate’s head.”

“Not any thought,” Brendol corrected, now nearly reduced to whispers. “There’s power in pain. And in practical details. If you can’t avoid a telepath, deflect them with a simpler story. Sprinkle in pain, and these dark siders won’t know the difference.”

“I don’t know what that means.”

“And you shouldn’t need to.” His voice hardened again, posture snapping back to attention. “Snoke has no interest in you. You won’t be the one he breaks.”

“But you, father— sir. You’ve got a date with the firing line.”

“13:00 sharp,” Brendol quoted. “I’ll meet with you around 11 to let you know if it goes well.”

A sleight of hand— any eavesdroppers would assume he had simply forgotten to use military time, that he was referring to 11:00pm, when Armitage typically left his lab for bed.

“If not?”

“I’ll take care of us.”

“Take care of us?”

“We mustn’t leave any trace,” Brendol said, speaking mainly to himself. He had at last stopped his pacing to rest by the window, overlooking a glowing expanse of land. “A clean end.”

.

At 10:30 Brendol returned, when Armitage was still frozen on his lab stool. His father knocked on the door. “I haven’t met with Snoke yet, and I need you to look over this early design plan for his dreadnought before I do…”

He carefully emphasized those first words: “I haven’t met with Snoke yet.”

“Copy, sir,” Armitage quipped, forcing a smile.

.

At 10:32 Armitage threw the design plans aside. Instead, he was trying to pin down the details of experiencing someone else’s loops, as complications might arise with multiple time-travelers at work. Unfortunately, the Huxes excelled in passing down stories of debauchery and addiction and fiery downfalls, but they had failed to pass down any useful experimental data about the edge cases of their magic.

.

At 10:35 he realized how his father might “take care” of them both. Armitage could design a detonator that’d blow up both their explosive trackers with no trouble at all. Perhaps he _ had _ designed it before he knew the intended use case, in a loop of his father’s he couldn’t remember.

A clean end. Not a single trace of either Hux left.

.

At 10:36 he weighed the pros and cons. His father would be able to alert him in the case of success, in case he met with Snoke and lived long enough to do it all over. If Brendol failed, then he planned to keep his wits long enough to blow the last of the Hux line to smithereens. But there were a thousand shades of gray in the middle, where Brendol might make it through once but not dare try his luck in a second loop, where he died too fast and couldn’t eliminate them both…

Armitage’s thoughts drifted back to the lake.

.

At 10:39, Armitage made a list of three strategies by which he could save his father and himself by returning to his adolescence. Of course if he had to repeat those years yet again, he felt he might walk into the lake for absolutely no reason at all.

.

At 11:00, Armitage had no visitors.

.

At 11:01, he booted up his old astromech droid and began monitoring for communications from Snoke’s ship. Unable to break their encryption he switched to cruder methods, maneuvering a geological satellite into place and refocusing it on the energy distribution of Snoke’s surprisingly thin-walled ship. With careful study he managed to discern the patterns in energy usage— unique waves from the engine, shields, and other core systems, growing and ebbing in cycles. Their rhythms held steady.

.

At 12:00, Snoke was scheduled to speak with Rae Sloane. Armitage tracked the power shift of the hangar doors as her shuttle approached. No further changes.

.

At 13:00, the hangar doors once again opened.

.

At 13:10, a new pattern emerged in jagged, irregular spikes, and Armitage quickly scanned the Academy’s databases for matches. The closest pattern came from med droids, reactivated after a long period of being powered off.

Then came the slow whirring increase of a containment field coming online.

(Armitage loops)

Time travel had never been a pleasant experience, between the high-velocity crash and the phantom taste of blood, but the evidence suggested this instance was the worst of the lot. First the crash came too early, before Armitage could prepare for the shock of impact. Then the blood got drowned out by the stench of smoke in his nostrils. When he snapped back into reality he was lying alone on his bed, only to lurch back out of place and land on his feet instead. Now he was in a small dark room, smothered by what felt like gaberwool on both sides. He was swaying, but so was the whole room. On all sides metal clinked. The ground was shaking and grinding under his feet. His head seethed with a rage that wasn’t his own.

A slice of light broke the darkness.

“Get out here,” Brendol commanded.

Armitage stepped out of a closet— his father’s closet, which would account for the fine gaberwool and the clinking of medals. It did not account for how Armitage had ended up in his father’s closet, which he didn’t recall entering ever before in this timeline, nor for why he and his father were still here and not in their designated groundquake shelter, nor why he himself was _ still a fully-grown adult_.

Brendol looked him up and down until the quake subsided. “So you _ are _ a time-traveler. I wasn’t sure.”

“Excuse me? I’m not—”

“Don’t deny it. It’s a waste of time.”

He was caught under his father’s steel gaze, dumbstruck. “I don’t recall how I got here.”

“Serves you right for playing with paradox.”

“What do you mean, ‘paradox’?”

“You’re the scientist,” Brendol said, dripping poison. “Surely you’re familiar with the term.”

Paradoxes arose when two seemingly irreconcilable facts needed to simultaneously be true.

“What time is it?”

“A better question.” Brendol rotated his wrist, allowing Armitage to view his chronometer.

It was the dead of night, when Armitage ought to have been in bed sleeping. It was less than a day before that fateful dinner when Brendol had told him to tidy his lab for Snoke’s benefit.

“I had to be in bed,” he deduced, narrowing his eyes. “And yet I have to be in your closet for...some reason, and that led to a paradox.” 

He glanced around his father’s bedroom, its shelves emptied of their trophies. They had been shaken by a tremor that wasn’t there in Armitage’s memory.

“You disrupted how space had to look around your return. That disruption has consequences.”

“A groundquake?”

“A minor one. You’re lucky it wasn’t worse,” Brendol snapped. “It’s a miracle we haven’t killed each other, both looping blindly. I can’t imagine why you didn’t _ tell me_—”

“Can’t you?”

A deathly quiet fell.

“So I looped back in time,” Armitage said, hastening to reassemble the fragments. “I meant to go back further and couldn’t, so I asked _ you _ to jump back a few hours and have me jump again— a relay race, if you will.”

Brendol watched his son silently.

“There’s more,” he mused. “I probably gave you some message to convey to my younger self.”

Brendol nodded brusquely. “You told me, ‘fail plant, fair sneak, mend radar.’ An encrypted message, I assume, some kind of sophisticated cipher.”

“It is,” Armitage nodded. In truth it was one of the crude codes that had been all the rage when he was a teenager. Keeping the consonants of the message, he simply changed the vowels: _ Flee planet, fear Snoke, mind reader. _Hardly a perfect one-to-one mapping, but it sounded like the best he might produce in a pinch.

“What went wrong?”

“I assume you did,” Brendol said, face now twisting into a jeer. “You stepped into this closet and attempted to jump, and failed. Your powers are not fully under your control.”

Armitage drew himself up, about to assert in righteous fury that his powers were a marvelous blade wielded entirely by his own will and tucked up his sleeve at all times, but he stopped himself. He remembered his earliest days when he seemed to have no powers at all.

“How far back did you intend to jump?” questioned his father. After a pause, he chuckled. “I don’t know why I asked, when I can have no faith in your answer.”

They stood, dangling at a cliff’s edge.

“What will you do instead,” Armitage retorted, “trap me in a chokehold?”

“No.” Brendol paused, shaking his head, then shaking it again with more vehemence. “That was never real.”

He lifted an eyebrow. “And yet I remember.”

Brendol wasted a second on slack-jawed staring. Armitage stepped back into the closet.

(Armitage loops)

Again came the crash, the smoke and blood and shifting ground. Again a sliver of light penetrated the darkness.

“Get out here,” his father commanded.

“Pity,” Armitage said as he stepped back out. “I thought surely that’d be enough of a disruption to collapse the planet.”

Brendol’s haughty look shattered to reveal fright. “What are you doing, boy?”

“Boy?” Armitage snarled back, for once matching his vitriol. “You know what I’m capable of, and that’s still how you think of me?”

“This quake is not only your doing,” his father snapped back.

“I engineered it all!”

“And what were you intending, pray tell?”

Once again, the revelations hit in a set of three.

First, Brendol’s mind had deteriorated for decades, no matter how well he used his time travel to hide it, and he would thus have been particularly vulnerable to Snoke.

Second, Armitage was still largely intact. He had a better shot of sneaking past Snoke, so long as he offered a simpler, pain-laced narrative to deflect any interest in his real power.

Third, the Hux blood held the potential for galactic change. Potential for catastrophe, if a bad actor exploited it with experiments. Potential for salvation, if a Hux could monitor Snoke, subtly undoing his worst instincts, blunting the damage he surely wished to inflict on the galaxy.

“I intended to show the First Order that you are _ nothing_,” Armitage sneered, drawing himself up to his full height. He loomed over him, drawing on the odd rage still boiling in his head and mimicking the most lurid of Brendol Hux’s rhetoric. “That you crumpled with this planet you’ve so recklessly destroyed with your pathetic attempts at mining. I intended—”

A fist cut him off, right on cue. Armitage let the pain settle into his head, swelling with horror and shame and a rare flicker of anger all his own, but still he tamped down the urge to defend himself. He disliked unnecessary pain, and this was anything but.

He lost track of the blows. The tears nearly blinded him. He choked twice on the blood, a real, thick stream filling his mouth and staining his teeth.

Once he had crumpled on the ground, playing dead, Brendol pivoted away to his desk. Perhaps he was returning to his work. Perhaps he was retrieving one of the three lethal weapons he kept locked inside.

Armitage was dressed only in an undershirt and boxers, his own weapons nowhere to be seen. He quietly pushed himself up, sent Brendol stumbling with a quick kick to the back of the knees, and threw himself back into the closet.

(Armitage loops)

The crash and smoke and blood didn’t bother him so badly this third time. They were outweighed by the relief of returning to his old body, one outwardly unmarked by violence.

“Get out here,” his father commanded.

Armitage waited a moment, pausing to compose himself, burying his face in the soft close knit of the gaberwool. Then he emerged.

Brendol looked him up and down until the quake subsided. “So you _ are _ a time-traveler. I wasn’t sure.”

Armitage squared his shoulders and said, “I am.”

There was irritation in Brendol’s face, but it melted away immediately, replaced by stars in his eyes. They glowed with pride, pride and loyalty and affection. Armitage wished he could bask in that warmth forever.

“It’s a new development,” Armitage said softly, deferently. “I didn’t discover it for years. The second I did, I came to you, and you suggested this sort of relay race. We hoped to reach back as far as the battle of Jakku, but I’m afraid I seem to have hit a sort of wall around now. That message I must’ve told you, that was...” He paused briefly, striving for a plausible explanation. “That encoded the day I discovered my powers.”

Confusion creased Brendol’s brow. “How does it do that?”

“The first letters of the phrase give the date,” he promptly replied. “F, P, F, S, M, R... I came from 6:16 of the sixth month, on the nineteenth day, in the year of 13 plus 18.”

“That’s…”

“A long while from now,” he said, smiling in spite of himself.

And indeed, for one rare moment his father radiated contentment. 

“Come,” he said, clapping his hands. “I’ve a bottle of wine I’ve kept from Arkanis. And I’ve savored it many times over, but this seems like as good a moment as any to drink it for real.”

“I ought to go to the lab,” Armitage said apologetically, “just to make a note of the experiment, but I’ll join you in a moment.”

“Of course, my son.”

.

The back station of Armitage’s lab was covered with vials; he had been trying to craft a cheap toxin filter that could be applied to all the stormtrooper helmets. He had failed dramatically, finding the necessary antidotes impossible to reproduce cheaply. Though he effectively gave up the project within a few weeks, he had neglected to clean up the chemicals.

.

Armitage entered the dining room, trying to infuse his steps with the sort of quiet pride he might actually attain if he lived to year 31. After fiddling with a key Brendol unlocked the liquor cabinet and pulled out a wine he had owned since Arkanis, bottled in exquisite purple crystal with a thousand glimmering facets. Popping out to the kitchen, Armitage returned with a pair of long-stemmed metal glasses.

“Let me,” he offered.

Brendol gave him a gracious nod, and Armitage stepped to the cabinet and took over the role of pouring their drinks.

“Tell me,” Brendol said, suffused with hope. “What are we like in the future?”

“You at last get your rest,” he replied. “You no longer need to oversee the daily bustle of the First Order, our power is so complete.”

“_Our_?”

“_I _ might just join High Command,” he teased on a whim. “I know it must seem a ridiculous idea to you now, but by the grace of Snoke’s support I manage to step into the role gracefully enough—”

“It doesn’t seem ridiculous at all,” Brendol interrupted, taking the drink from his son and sipping it thoughtfully. “I’ve believed in your potential since birth. It’s just a matter of your reaching it.”

Armitage tasted his wine, nodding.

“Promise me,” his father said between further sips. “Promise me now that you have this power, you’ll use it to the best of your ability. Be as strong and diligent and patient as necessary, to be the best you can be.”

“Of course.” 

They raised their goblets in a simultaneous toast, and Brendol took another generous swallow.

“This is even stronger than I remember,” he observed with a laugh, slightly slurring the words.

Armitage snorted delicately. “An excellent vintage.”

“Your mother’s favorite, did you know that?”

Armitage shook his head, now subjecting the crimson liquid to careful inspection. He stared at the goblet, his own face distorted in its mirrored surface. By keeping his eyes down Armitage hid the tears clinging crystalline to his eyelashes, refusing to disappear.

“I suppose,” he murmured, “you’ll want all the practical details of the rise of the First Order, to optimize further this time around.”

“No need to describe them all just now,” his father replied with a guffaw. “We’ll have to record them all systematically with secure digital backups, starting tomorrow. My son, we’ve all the time in the world to do it properly.”

“All the time in the world,” he echoed, still contemplating the ripples of the wine.

Metal slammed down on wood. Armitage’s gaze snapped up to his father, who was now staring down at his own glass in horror, breaths growing labored.

“Why?” he rasped.

“It was necessary,” Armitage replied.

He expected to fend off a last stand, his father stumbling out of his chair for one last speech or one last swing. Instead Brendol’s face slackened with something strangely like relief. Perhaps it was only his muscles locking up, but Armitage discerned a small nod.

.

Dioxis worked with remarkable speed. Armitage had inoculated himself with the antidote, but he took one more dose just to be certain. He disliked unnecessary pain, and so he then checked that his father was unconscious before exposing his monomolecular blade. As it was necessary to dispose of the biological remains entirely to keep them out of Snoke’s reach, he at last made real use of the acid lake.

The fog hung heavy on all sides. Armitage couldn’t shake the haze of shock from his own head.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For anyone who's wondering, the total fic will be about 18 chapters long.

In previous years Armitage had looked over the technical processes of reconditioning in order to stop subjects from committing suicide. Though the system overall was complex, its biochemical subtleties beyond his understanding, the psychological rationale was quite simple. Other regimes had attempted to terrorize conscripts into obedience. The First Order learned from their mistakes. 

The Order’s approach to obtaining compliance— mostly— skipped the explicit threats.

Instead it pushed conscripts to reflect on the shortcomings of the worlds they had come from: stagnation, deprivation, chaos. Next it invited them to imagine a future where they accomplished all the dreams so long-denied, where they lived stable, comfortable lives and wielded great power against disorder. Finally it persuaded them that the First Order was the route to that charmed future and suggested that any act, no matter how violent, was justified in its service. 

The Order wove subliminal messages in the whole way through: forget who you used to be. Drop every unnecessary memory. Otherwise their poison tendrils will snake about your ankles, tying their knots and dragging you down into the depths.

Once Armitage skimmed his father’s communications and set his status to “unavailable”— signaling to every possible contact that Brendol was away on a stealth mission, or perhaps just busy with someone higher in the hierarchy— he approached the reconditioning chamber. It was a prototype still left on Dassal Prime though the bulk of conscript training now took place off-world. Without wasting a moment Armitage reprogrammed its settings, editing the details of its messaging and reducing the drug doses across the board. He made one more adjustment, inspired by the old Emperor himself.

Then Armitage strapped himself into the subject’s chair.

The haze in his head only thickened when the drugs kicked in, pumped in through tiny pores in the walls, and for one moment he admired his father’s handiwork, how deceptively easy it was to be swept up in the chamber’s narrative. Then the current caught him. 

He lost himself in the sea of overlapping syllables, too tangled for him to grasp consciously though he assumed his subconscious was absorbing them all. 

_ think of the worst_, commanded the chamber. 

Images drifted up at once of Brendol’s rage, the few snatches of rage that Armitage had managed to preserve over the years. The threat always stretched thin beneath every civil conversation, ready to snap in Armitage’s face. The constant psychological wear that had left him threadbare in his early years, when he was never good enough, when he was never the best he could be. The final explosion. 

_ think of the best you could be within the First Order _

A trickier challenge, but his imagination supplied enough. While ranks and positions held little inherent appeal for him, he aspired to the role of technical expert regardless. He wanted the excuse to stay off the front lines, instead flitting from one arms-maker to the other. He wanted to roam the galaxy until he could— _ not escape, the statement specified “within the First Order” _— perfect a whole range of projects in every imaginable scientific field. He could master the theory without once facing the mess of practical deployment.

_ justify the violence _

Brendol had been mad, and flawed, and there were traces even in this final timeline that he had so carefully assembled. His record was littered with mistakes that he caught too late, made more glaring by the perfectionism he so vocally practiced. Other teachers could replace him in the Academy, perhaps removing the stain of wanton violence. Brendol had presented himself as a master strategist orchestrating all the First Order’s recent victories, but now Armitage knew that credit had been misattributed. It rightfully belonged with Snoke. Next to Snoke, Brendol was nothing, and Armitage had done the Supreme Leader a service by eliminating him so painlessly.

_ shed your skins, peel the layers, eject truth from the nearest airlock _

Just for now.

.

There was nothing but fog when he emerged, nothing but stuffing between his ears. His mind had been transformed into a rock, a random chunk carved from Dassal Prime’s surface, rough and shapeless and so marred by impurities its reddened glow was nearly gone. But there was a story etched clearly enough on the surface. Armitage clung to that story, a simple linear narrative, and ignored the niggling depths. 

In an attempt to reclaim some clarity of thought he locked himself in his lab, and when he wasn’t impersonating his father on assorted digital media, he busied himself with a new data-tape from the Republic. It explicated the newest developments on the cosmological constant theory, which claimed every unit of space contained some constant amount of dark energy just by virtue of existing.

Snoke ordered a meeting with Armitage even before arriving in the Dassal System— the first of all his meetings with Order personnel.

.

Armitage wore an overlong gaberwool coat, retrieved from the back of his father’s closet. He sat straight-backed on the shuttle up to Snoke’s main ship, keeping still as he had as a child under his father’s eye. Brendol would order, _ stay here, don’t touch anything, you mustn’t ever touch anything_. For the first time he closed his grip tight around the memory, refusing to let it dissolve.

He ought to have been dissolving in an acid lake.

He brushed his hair down, locked in place by his father’s favorite gel, and buttoned the black coat though it wasn’t cold, and entered Snoke’s chambers.

.

The throne struck him first. It sat at the center of an otherwise unremarkable room, a stone slab looming high over Armitage’s head. The creature himself leaned back easily, wholly at home on a throne. His head was a mass of pockmarks and scars with only the outline of a face. His robe was pure gold.

“Armitage Hux,” Snoke said, his voice half-simper and half-snarl. “I’ve looked forward to this moment for longer than you might imagine.”

“As have I,” he answered blandly, mimicking the other pupils who used to flatter his father. “Your reputation precedes you.”

“As does yours.”

“Oh?”

“Your projects. Your father spoke highly of them, though I could elicit almost nothing else about you from him,” Snoke said, with a languid flick of a ringed finger. “For such a braggart, he was remarkably guarded.”

A moment later, Armitage felt the probe in his head, like long, shriveled fingers skimming the surface of water to observe the ripples.

“‘Was,’ my lord?”

Snoke’s mouth twisted into an approximation of a smile. “Don’t you wonder why I let your father have his secrets? I’ve known for years that you’d be the one I’d deal with.”

“I...didn’t know such foresight was possible.”

“You have my congratulations,” Snoke murmured. “It was a particularly clean death, but then I would expect nothing less from the Order’s best engineer.”

The fingers stirred a circle in the water and up came Brendol’s voice from the depths: _ I shall die on the battlefield in the line of fire, I will not succumb to the foul darkness of a less glorious death, I will certainly not be murdered by _you

“Do you appreciate irony?” Snoke’s voice took on an eerie lilt.

“I’m learning to,” Armitage replied. He suddenly noticed that the room’s lights had been dimming, so slowly he barely noticed the progress.

_ They’re counting on you now, you must at all times be the best you can be _

The conversation died when the lights did, and Armitage stayed standing as his skull split. It was a very particular agony, enduring Snoke’s laser-beam scrutiny. Somehow Snoke had locked him in place without a containment field in sight, like one of the alien specimens he used to suspend within glass slides for the Academy microscope. In a few seconds his eyes adjusted to the darkness.

In a few seconds Armitage learned the patterns of Snoke’s Force probe. It rolled about like a defective BB-unit, crashing at random through his carefully positioned ramparts, speedy and unstoppable. Seconds later, Armitage engineered a solution. He simply attached the wayward droid to an infinitesimally small string.

With one infinitesimally slight shift, Armitage stole control of the probe.

No sudden tugs. No sharp turns. A single movement might give him away if Snoke once suspected that he had lost his hold on the probe, and so Armitage steered it downwards, straight into the lightless depths of his head. Keeping Snoke carefully snared on the end of his leash, he pulled him straight to Brendol’s death. Snoke took in the scene— the poisoned wine, _what are we like in the future,_ _I might just join High Command_. Next Armitage sent their tour to the preceding violence: the blunt impact of his father’s fists, his father’s blaster hilt smacking his adolescent ribs, the easy slice of his own monomolecular blade through skin. 

Armitage felt resistance as Snoke slowed, exulting in these scenes, draping the violence over himself like molten gold. The thread between them thrummed with his sadistic glee.

In time Armitage drew Snoke into his own resentment at being cooped up in that drab Dassal lab, into his skepticism of the more extreme tactics his father used in his career. Into his yearning to roam space free of chains, under no command but his own.

It was a simple story. He thought Snoke would swallow it without question.

“What are you hiding?” Snoke’s lips never moved, and yet the question bounced between the split halves of Armitage’s skull. “I can taste your guilt.”

Armitage stirred the bottom of the lake. Offered up his father’s corpse, half-rotten in the acid.

“No,” Snoke breathed. “What are you hiding from me?”

Armitage had hidden the power of his bloodline deep during his reconditioning, buried it so far he feared he himself might never find it again, but now his subconscious warned that the time travel hung just inches from Snoke’s unfurling fingers. In a panic he flung Snoke’s probe at his interest in theoretical physics.

Snoke jerked against his throne, thrown by the abrupt change, but Armitage stood his ground. He poured forth the hours he had spent studying theories, strings and loops and dark energy, at a thousand hypotheses that couldn’t be tested, much less proven in his lifetime. He unearthed the guilt he had repressed for so many years at wasting his time. At having to hide the extent of his studies from his father. At dallying with mere useless _ fictions _ when he could instead have been sharpening himself, preparing properly to be the best he could be.

With a nod, Snoke at last retreated.

“Your father had told me of your wish to move off-world.”

The paralysis lifted, and Armitage dropped to the floor. He panted, now racked by a throbbing headache.

“I thought I might apprentice with an arms dealer,” he offered while picking himself up off the ground. “We agreed I would be most useful to the First Order there.”

“You persuaded him of that, yes,” Snoke hummed. “But we both know he underestimated your potential. I will not make the same mistake.”

“My lord?”

“High Command will be a good fit for you.”

Armitage’s jaw dropped.

“You will have your autonomy onboard your Destroyer,” Snoke said simply.

“But— my lord, I am no strategist. I am not familiar with the process of, say, taking a planet—”

“It’s quite simple as I understand it,” Snoke replied, with a mocking delicacy. “You either intimidate them into surrender or kill them all.”

“But then what of the Jedi?” he protested. “Surely you’ll want officers who know about the Force—”

“I came to Dassal because the Jedi are no longer a threat. Their kind was largely exterminated just a few days back.”

Armitage’s subconscious strained to demand an exact time, to see whether the Jedi were dying right when his time travel powers failed. He kicked the impulse back.

“But what of the _ New Republic_?” he said, nearly shouting.

“_You _ will handle the New Republic.” Snoke shot to his feet, and Armitage stumbled back as he roared, “_You _ will lead the First Order to a glory your father’s tiny mind could never have comprehended. _ I _ have foreseen it.”

“But—”

“You grow tiring, Armitage.”

“Hux,” he blurted.

“What?”

After a momentary war with himself, he stated, “I prefer ‘Hux.’”

Snoke tilted his head, as if considering the pleasure he would derive from disembowling his new favorite on the spot.

“Well, then, General Hux.” He gave him a leering grin. “I expect great things from you.”

.

Armitage sat up too straight in the shuttle back down and strode straight to his lab. He had planted a trigger somewhere, something to undo the reconditioning. But now that he was out of Snoke’s clutches and lost in his headache he couldn’t remember _ what _ that trigger was, and the panic rose as he tore apart his labs, reading every half-scrawled label.

His old astromech droid whirred to life in the corner. It had taken to falling in and out of reality at random; Armitage largely ignored it.

“Not now!”

In binary it asked, “Do you wish to perform a memory reboot?”

“A what?” he said, only half-hearing. Instead he was now smelling chemicals with reckless abandon, hoping one might unlock his old self.

“Do you wish to perform a memory reboot?”

“A— yes,” he choked out.

“Execute Command 132,” it beeped.

Armitage fell back into reality, the two halves of his self snapping back together at the trigger. His memories ran back through him and crackled into his nerves like an electric surge. Then struck the irony of being a general. Of being _ General Hux_, as if his father hadn’t lived a hundred lives chasing after that exact title.

He set down the beaker in his fist slowly, careful not to break it. Then Armitage Hux, General of the First Order, dropped to the floor and sobbed into the folds of an overlong gaberwool coat.

.

The minute Armitage arrived on the _Finalizer_, he imposed his first decree, requiring that his subordinates document their doings more precisely. His second decree also increased paperwork.

And his third.

And his fourth through tenth.

Looping back in time had grown more dangerous now. If he once again landed a few days before his first meeting with Snoke, he doubted he’d survive the meeting— not when Snoke might recognize his own fingerprints, cold and withering on Armitage’s psyche, and realize that he had been there before.

Still it didn’t hurt to be prepared, and so Armitage demanded impeccable record-keeping, enamoured of organization for the first time in his life. If he happened to land conveniently at a later moment, once he had already assumed his command, he’d be able to reorient himself swiftly by skimming the records.

The effects of the reconditioning had worn away, but Armitage split himself once again through more natural methods. He donned the role of General Hux, at every moment keenly aware of the con.

He leaned into caricature. He extended his sincere need for proper record-keeping to its absurd conclusion. He gelled down his hair and griped when his uniform was less than perfectly pressed. He snapped at subordinates for slouching and increased the penalties for drinking contraband liquor, gambling, or otherwise indulging in banned recreational activities.

One night he opened his closet door and found some enterprising soldier had left a gift in hopes of winning his favor— three black coats of pure gaberwool, all in precisely his size.

.

Armitage successfully buried himself in paperwork. Unfortunately, he also had to fight a war.

He hadn’t paid attention to the Academy’s strategy lessons since his days as a negotiator, and so he flung himself into meetings and research, trading sleep for studying. Even as he researched, his practical work piled up— urgent supply orders that needed his signature, brand-new intelligence reports that he had to digest instantly. He barked out orders and tried to limit the damage, all the while besieged by the feeling of flying blind. He leaned on diplomacy rather than bloodshed.

Sometimes diplomacy failed.

“What happens,” he asked Rae Sloane in his early days, “if we don’t succeed in turning some particular system?”

She answered with a question: “Who gave you the impression that failure was an option?”

Sometimes diplomacy failed, and with a breathless panic rising in his throat he fell back on his father’s old tactics. Where negotiations would not do, he opted for quick, brutal violence against a few key targets, intimidating the masses into submission.

“You’re moving too slowly against Venen,” Snoke warned him over hologram.

Fingertips grazed the surface of Armitage’s mind— light, but unshakably present.

He breathed in deep, striving not to think of his last encounter with Venen. “They have weapons that we do not fully understand. A ground assault is an unnecessary risk.”

Armitage tried to banish the memories of a lightless room, of vents that may or may not have conducted dioxis gas. Still they lingered, unpleasantly sharp in his head.

“You fear them. Why?”

He flinched. Snoke acknowledged his surprise with a delicate snort.

“My father spoke often and highly of their technical expertise.”

He watched carefully as Snoke swallowed the lie, apparently unable to deduce the thoughts behind Armitage’s emotions over hologram.

“Their technology is indeed remarkable. I look forward to seeing what your mind will do with it after you confiscate it all.”

“I wasn’t— I have no plans to confiscate it _ all_, I wouldn’t even know where to start—”

“You will find a way. I have foreseen it.”

Armitage stood quiet, at a loss for words.

He didn’t know whether prophecies always held true— whether they _ could _ hold true for a time-traveler— but he decided this particular prophecy was perhaps not the best test case. Wary of disappointing Snoke so early in his career he ordered a full ground assault on Venen. It proved successful, securing all of Venen’s caches and laboratories for the First Order. He nonetheless lost a hundred troopers to an ambush.

“Brendol never fell for ambushes,” muttered an old Imperial officer now under his command.

The whole bridge paused at Armitage’s sudden hysterical laughter.

.

Armitage worked until all his nerves were raw, until his defenses wore away and left bits of live wire exposed. His father’s memory shone constantly in his eyes, blinding him with tears though no one else could see it. He tried to draw power from it. To steal some of Brendol Hux’s fire for himself.

.

The First Order used strict data security protocols, keeping even top officials away from sensitive data that did not concern them. On the one hand, Armitage appreciated that these constraints would keep other officials out of his business. On the other hand, he himself would need centuries to break through all the security, and sabotage was made more difficult when you couldn’t tell what targets were available, much less prioritize them sensibly. For months, Armitage danced around the edges of a classified entity named “Core.” From what he could deduce “Core” was a specialized strike team requiring disproportionate amounts of money despite having next to no personnel. He flirted with asking the Supreme Leader for clarification, under the pretense of objecting to their lavish funding, but thought better of it.

Given his rank, some old Imperial files had been officially declassified.

They were research papers, mostly. Maps of the Unknown Regions that Brendol had used to flee to Dassal. Statistics from cloning research, where the Empire made small adjustments to nutrition or conditioning and evaluated the results. The outline of a personal project of the Emperor himself— collecting blood samples from some subjects informatively labeled “S1” and “S2” and storing them at the Imperial lab on Jakku. Armitage looked for the project’s results, for some explanation of what “S1” and “S2” were and why anyone would be interested in them. He was confronted by a blank space.

He left biology alone for something infinitely more fascinating.

The Empire, it appeared, had devoted some of its extravagant resources to the study of theoretical physics. This discovery hit Armitage like a line of raw coaxium to a hyperdrive. He dedicated every spare minute to sifting through the studies. Evidence of a new dimension, “sub-hyperspace,” suggested that wormholes were real. Observations of supernovae in faraway galaxies confirmed that the universe was expanding, offering more proof than Armitage ever dreamed possible. And one obscure experiment had verified the existence of dark energy— not some constant inherent in space, but an elastic fabric like a blanket that could spread itself thick or thin, stretching until it was downright threadbare at certain points. They called this energy “quintessence,” and it single-handedly solved a hundred mysteries and opened a hundred more. Yet the scientists involved were only interested in “capturing” the dark energy to weaponize it, and when their initial efforts failed the Empire defunded their lab and filed their results away as useless.

If the Emperor were still alive, Armitage would have personally executed him for that call.

.

Every day Armitage forced himself out of bed. A simple enough process to an untrained eye, but it felt like stepping off a bridge into an unforgiving void. Theoretical physics caught him, comforted him, reminding him that he needn’t disappear entirely into General Hux’s caricature and gaberwool coats. It was a delicate balance. He could live with it.

Still he stared at his reflection some mornings, the slick pomade and the cold gray-green eyes and the sneer he had stolen off his father’s face, and wondered whether the despair was etched clear on his face.

.

“Have you heard of the Knights of Ren?”

Armitage racked his brain for an answer. “I don’t believe so.”

“They use the dark side of the Force,” Snoke replied, “and serve the First Order.”

Knights of Ren. Armitage considered the initials— KOR— and thought of “Core.”

“May I access any records that might rectify this gap in my knowledge?”

“There is no need for research. The master of the knights shall join you on the _ Finalizer_.”

He swallowed hard. “And when might I expect them?”

“Today.” Snoke’s face twisted, half-grin, half-grimace. “You will know when he arrives.”


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This chapter: white ribbons, red strings of fate, and absolutely no red flags whatsoever!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Diamonds seem to be called "Corusca gems" in canon. On a semi-related note, Kylo Ren/Ben Solo's birthday is canonically on the same day as the Galactic Concordance.

There was no time for proper reconditioning. Armitage closed his eyes and wished— he did not pray, there could be no divinity in this amoral, godless galaxy— that this particular darksider happened not to have any telepathic powers. On a more practical note, he armed himself even more heavily than usual, mixing smoke grenades and other devices of distraction in with the usual suspects. He tried to repress all errant thoughts of time travel, focusing instead on questions of First Order tactics.

Yet his limbs all felt newly zapped with an electric current, and his focus oscillated between different strategic matters too fast to make any progress on any of them, and in a manner fully foreign to him he dithered in front of the mirror, trying to determine which of his coats most flattered him.

Every second the knight drew closer.

.

Armitage wasn’t wholly sure what he expected, but this wasn’t it.

Descending from his Upsilon-class shuttle, Kylo Ren clanked up to him with all the grace of a washed-up bounty hunter on his sixth drink, a far cry from Snoke’s slithering elegance. His rag of a cowl had been flung over his head askew, loose threads dangling at random. He wore a bucket on his head.

Still Armitage felt as if every nerve in his body had been plucked, had suddenly ascended to a higher frequency, and as Kylo stalked around the _ Finalizer _Armitage settled into the position at his side. Kylo fortunately asked few questions, content to judge the ship in silence. Armitage couldn’t see his expression, but he was certain Kylo’s lips had curled into a sneer.

He was equally certain that Kylo had beautiful lips.

“And these,” Lieutenant Mitaka said, voice quavering with a mix of awe and terror as he conducted the tour, “are the interrogation rooms of the _ Finalizer._ We will next proceed to the—”

“I need a moment alone,” Kylo announced, voice disguised, made monstrous by the filter of his mask.

“Oh,” Mitaka stuttered. “Well, we have a conference room on the floor above us, I can make sure to empty it—”

“One of the cells will do.” In an obnoxious show of power, Kylo flicked a gloved hand and sent the nearest cell door flying open. Armitage frowned at how easily he overcame the locking mechanism.

“General?”

“Hm?”

“Would you join me?”

He wanted to.

Every alarm in his brain warned against it. Armitage’s own fingers twitched towards—

_ A smoke bomb? Ha. It’s a solid plan, as long as you ignore the fact that I can fight perfectly blindfolded. _

Armitage froze.

That was Kylo’s voice, in Armitage’s head. He recognized the cadence, the halting phrases and the bluntness that bordered on being socially inappropriate. Yet there was no filter on this voice, and so Armitage heard the humor previously obscured by the mask. The warmth.

_ No, I’ve decided not to kill you. _

Though he shouldn’t have, Armitage believed him.

“We need a moment alone,” he said to the rest of their escort. “You may all return to your regular schedule.”

Kylo gestured for him to enter first— perhaps as a threat, or perhaps as an awkward show of chivalry. He did, and Kylo shut the door behind them.

“What is this?” Armitage instantly demanded. “Who are you?”

_ Are we being watched? _

Armitage swallowed hard. Then he moved to the cell’s control panel and turned off the surveillance system, using his own personal override code. Behind him, Kylo lifted his fingertips to his mask and undid the latch with a quiet hiss. 

When he lifted it off, Armitage could do nothing but stare.

“I’m like you,” Kylo said softly.

Armitage had been right about the lips. They were beautiful, unreasonably so. The fact that they were mildly out of proportion with the rest of the face— that in fact _ all _ his features seemed slightly at odds with each other— made Armitage like his mouth all the more. He was younger than Armitage thought, perhaps younger than _ him_, though the sorrow in his dark deep-set eyes spoke of an older soul.

“No,” Kylo said. “I’m not a time-traveler.”

“How could you—”

“Know that was your next question?” Kylo tried to keep his expression solemn, serious enough to match his dreary garb, but a smile shone through in his eyes. “You can’t feel it?”

In synchrony they lifted their hands and removed their black gloves. Their palms were pale and visibly unmarked, and yet.

“Perhaps we should...”

Kylo nodded.

In magnetic synchrony they reached out to each other.

Armitage knew it was impossible for the universe to take note of two mere humans. Time could not stop still for them, could not hold its breath as their fingers touched, then folded inextricably together.

And yet.

“You were Ben Solo,” he gasped. “You were born—”

“On the day of the Concordance. You mean to burn Snoke’s throne to the ground—”

“You burnt the new Jedi to the ground—”

“Your magic’s tied up with mine, isn’t it? I don’t know why, but—”

“Somehow. Every time I looped back to—”

“Was a day I changed, mind and soul,” Kylo agreed, breathless. “You couldn’t travel until I was born. The first wall in your head was the Concordance, _ my birthday_—”

“And the third was when you left the Jedi, and the second was the day you realized Snoke’s voice in your head wasn’t just you,” Armitage whispered.

“My childhood wasn’t so bad,” Kylo said in protest at the way Armitage’s brow had crumpled. “Not as bad as what your father did to you.”

“You turned on your side.”

“You mean to turn on ours.”

Armitage meant to withdraw his hand. He found it wouldn’t move.

“Your self-delusion runs strong,” he told Kylo, with a smile in his voice at the hypocrisy, “but I can see your truth. Only the outline, but it’s light in your heart, as far as the eye can see.”

“I can’t see yours,” Kylo replied, a tiny frown sewing itself into his brow. “It’s like looking at a crystal or a Corusca gem. There’s a thousand facets, and from every angle it’s something different.”

Raising an eyebrow, he wryly remarked, “I’ve been told I’m hard to predict.” 

“You are,” Kylo murmured.

He let go of Armitage’s hands to instead cup his cheeks. Armitage let his eyes flutter closed and his head fall ever so lightly into Kylo’s waiting hands. He let go of a load he had carried for decades.

“But I caught you,” Kylo said, voice warmed through. “I always will, you’ll see.”

.

That day Armitage’s mask fell.

The other troopers were staring. He couldn’t blame them, not when a traitorous smile played at his lips. Not when he and Kylo kept up a running commentary all through the rest of the day.

_ Your troopers genuinely think you perfect. _

_ It’s the reconditioning. _

_ Obviously. Only drugs could explain how they like your hair. _

Armitage protested: _ My hair is novel! _

_ And starched within an inch of its life. _

_ As if you don’t spend a thousand credits a year on your precious locks. _

_ I’m flattered you noticed. _

It was unfocused, frivolous talk, absurdly out of place on the bridge of a warship, and Armitage wondered if he was at last acting his age. Amidst the glee was a thread of wrath, an act of seething reclamation. He put it off and concentrated on the duel, the endless lines of banter between two well-matched minds.

They had time enough for the real discussions.

.

_ Will you turn me in to Snoke? _

_ Not if I can help it_. _ But I don’t agree with whatever mischief you’re plotting; it’ll get you killed. _

_ There isn’t a plot yet, _ Armitage snorted, _ just a general proclivity for sabotage. _

It was madness, admitting this. The sweetest madness he had ever known. 

That night they haunted opposite sides of the ship, Armitage seemingly busy with supply requisitions, Kylo occupied by swinging his lightsaber. It was a green sword, the one Ben Solo had used, and Kylo fumed every time he powered it on. Armitage felt unreasonably fond of it.

They whispered in each other’s heads, out of sight. No camera would know it. Snoke wouldn’t know it. It was buried deep, this bond connecting them. It had always been there, Armitage realized.

_ Why is the Force binding us? _ he had asked. _ Do you think we’re… _

It was unbearably sentimental.

_ I don’t know_, Kylo answered. _ Perhaps there’s a prophecy somewhere, but I don’t know of it. _

Armitage added this to the end of his increasingly lengthy research agenda.

.

_ Why do you keep dreaming about dying suns? _

_ Why do you dream incessantly of a red lightsaber? _

_ It’s my destiny_, Kylo replied.

Armitage fell asleep that night and dreamt of Kylo, wrapped in a swath of black and bound with white ribbons.

Kylo was like him. 

It wasn’t an obvious conclusion. To him, Kylo’s mind seemed a dark, savage forest, full of tangled green paths where a wanderer might lose himself forever. Kylo observed that Armitage’s mind was by contrast clear-cut, to an almost inhuman degree— all right angles and lattice structures.

Yet in Kylo’s mind, Armitage recognized the same brimming fear, the same dread of being incomprehensibly special and therefore alone, the sense of being trapped that he himself had striven to repress. He recognized his own father’s machinations in Snoke’s whispers, running everywhere through Kylo’s psyche as long as he could remember. He identified the same horror at being betrayed by one’s own flesh and blood, for Luke Skywalker had turned on Kylo much as Brendol had turned on Armitage. Kylo had retaliated and left his uncle for dead, and his self-loathing echoed Armitage’s own. 

He knew Kylo’s world-weariness, his insomniac boredom, his insecurities and his costumes. Armitage found his own gaberwool coats reflected in Kylo’s cowl, a tattered scrap that threatened to unravel if one could simply pull the right thread.

He thought of the fog-covered lake on Dassal Prime where he had waited, so lonely for so long, watching normal people live their ordinary lives in the distance.

_ When you were younger, you dreamed of a knight who would emerge from the mists and slay your loneliness forever_.

_ I regret to inform you’re a little late. _

Kylo’s laughter hummed, bouncing about his head.

It seemed too lovely to be true, like an electric surge threatening to blow a fuse. It was more than Armitage ever deserved. He didn’t dare trust this wholly. But now as he lay half-asleep in the space between night and day, with Kylo’s soul tied firmly to his, he could see their fate. A happy ending, clear and linear and unbroken, stretching out into eternity.

.

The next morning, Armitage woke from a nightmare. Even when he forced his eyes open, the terror refused to lift. There was blood in his mouth— not his own— and a pounding in his head that sleep usually banished.

He skipped his morning routine, simply grabbing his weapons, a coat and a comlink. “Where is Kylo?”

“Lord Ren is currently being moved to the medbay on—”

Armitage dashed out of his room without heed for appearances, already honing in on Kylo’s sickbed. “What for?”

“We— we aren’t sure. Something to do with the Force, perhaps.”

He closed his eyes and tried reaching out. Kylo still lingered in his periphery, warm but faint. His whole body thrummed with pain that had no natural source.

Armitage snapped at the officer standing outside the medbay. “Where was he?”

“Conversing over hologram with the Supreme Leader, sir.”

“What exactly happened? Fetch me the footage.”

“We have none.”

With a sigh, Armitage entered the medbay.

Kylo lay unconscious amidst a rabble of med droids, his body still wrapped up in his black armor. Armitage stepped forward and found his face unnaturally pale, now hidden under an oxygen mask.

“What do the scans say?”

“The patient has sustained a concussion,” a droid reported in its hollow monotone, “There are no fractures, but he may have suffered additional brain damage due to temporary oxygen deprivation, consistent with bruising around his windpipe—”

The droids clucked in alarm as Armitage stepped forward and tugged down Kylo’s collar, revealing striped bluish bruises. Armitage hypothesized that they were inflicted by skinny fingers that had reached across the galaxy solely to close around his neck.

“Excuse me.” Armitage headed straight for the adjoining pantry, stuffed with bacta and bandages and rarer supplies. Its light automatically flicked on. He switched it back off.

(Armitage loops)

Armitage landed just where he had hypothesized, in the _ Finalizer_’s hangar before Kylo’s shuttle. Once again, Kylo Ren clanked his way down the ramp to meet him.

_ Who are you_?

Armitage met Kylo’s stare through the mask and smiled as Kylo rummaged around his head, efficiently reacquainting himself with their bond. His investigation was initially wary to the point of being cold, yet it warmed again.

Armitage let out an exhale of relief.

“General.”

“Lord Ren?”

“Why don’t we skip ahead?” He could hear Kylo’s smile in his voice, though the filter tried to obscure it. “It seems I only need you.”

“I—” The sentiment, so simply put, stole Armitage’s breath. “I suppose the rest of you are dismissed. Lord Ren and I will need to speak alone. On urgent tactical matters.”

“Top-secret,” Kylo added.

Armitage resisted the urge to laugh.

.

_ So we’re soulmates. _

_ ...Perhaps. I’m definitely a time-traveler, bound to return to the moment of your last major revelation. _

_ My first thought was you were insane, possibly brainwashed, _ Kylo snorted, _ but you seem balanced enough. Why is the Force connecting us? _

_ I asked you that, _ Armitage remarked. _ You replied with some nonsense about a prophecy that may or may not exist, it was very ambiguous. _

_ You’re ambiguous. _

_ I can’t tell if that’s a failed insult or an even worse complement. _

_ It’s a statement of fact, _ Kylo said plainly. _ I’ve never met anyone like you, you don’t feel like any human I’ve ever known. You feel... _

_ What? _

_ Among other things, you feel _mine.

_ Why are we in this wing, the conference rooms are the other way— _

_ We’re not going to the conference rooms. We’re going to your quarters. _

_ What for? Snoke nearly killed you in the last loop, perhaps because he identified our bond in your head, and we have no time to waste— _

_ Snoke nearly kills me on a regular basis, _ Kylo scoffed. _ It’s nothing to panic over. _

_ First, you’re mine and I reserve the right to doom anyone who hurts you to oblivion. Second, there is still no logical rationale for us to retreat to my quarters in the middle of the day— _

The doors shut. Kylo ripped off his mask, wheeled about, and crushed his lips against Armitage’s mouth.

_ Oh. _

.

That week, Armitage was uncharacteristically derelict in his duties. He hacked a med droid to report that he had fallen ill and required uninterrupted rest to recuperate.

_ You do need rest. _

_ I’m not ill! _

_ Not in the way they suspect, but… _

Armitage shot Kylo a glare and then resumed his research.

He had embarked on a scientific study, the most ambitious he had ever considered. A study that spanned the fields of physics, chemistry, and biology, that upended his understanding of the cosmos with every new revelation.

_ Are you mapping my _ moles_? _

_ Yes, and don’t you dare think of having a med droid remove them. There are patterns here, as grand as any constellation in the night sky. _

Kylo scoffed, a warm puff of air against his ear, and then flipped them both over. He pressed Armitage down into the pillow, pinning both his wrists with one over-large hand, stroking soft lines down vulnerable skin.

_ You like that_, thought Kylo.

_ I require further experiments before we draw any hard and fast conclusions. _

_ So you want it hard and fast? _

Armitage rolled his eyes, with an open theatricality that he had borrowed from Kylo.

_ No, that would be you. _ I _ like slow, sensible experiments. _

_ I’m learning to like them too_.

.

Armitage joked about scientific experiments, about his own excess of intellectualism and Kylo’s melodramatic tendencies. He laughed freely for the first time in memory, letting loose the acid little voice in his head. By some miracle, Kylo laughed too.

Regardless, he wasn’t wholly joking about the research. He felt like a frigid planet, yanked out of its orbit by a larger, closer body, by Kylo’s warm body lying and breathing softly in sleep beside him. Kylo Ren challenged all his theories, his long-held suspicion that he was doomed to pass through life useless and alone. 

Armitage had to recalibrate. He had to accept a law of nature, newly revealed but incontrovertible. He and Kylo were bound up together, had been since Kylo’s birth and perhaps before. They would likely die together. They were entirely inseparable, and he could fold his hands about this truth and cling to it. This truth— their bond— was unbreakable, as certain as the fact that time marched inexorably forward.

It occurred to Armitage that that was perhaps not the best choice of simile. He pushed the thought back and floated off to sleep.

.

Real life lingered rudely at the edges of their awareness. Heeding Armitage’s warnings, Kylo survived his next meeting with Snoke with only a few bruises, stalking back to the bridge in his armor.

_ He knows about us_. _ Don’t panic_.

Armitage whirled about to frown at him. The whole bridge turned to stare, as Kylo passed him by while pretending indifference.

_ Just the sex. _

_ He knows about the sex and you want me to _ not panic?

_ He thinks it doesn’t mean anything. _

_ You haven’t visited your own quarters once since you came onboard, _ Armitage exclaimed, _ and he thinks it doesn’t mean anything? How is that possible? _

_ He thinks it’s just a way of managing our natural antagonism. The way you’re scowling helps sell that. _

Armitage tried to stop scowling and decided it wasn’t worth the bother.

_ Sex purely as a result of antagonism? Is that even real? _

_ Yes. _

_ Do you know this from personal experience? _

_ I do_, Kylo answered. _ Did you think this is usual for me? Falling instantly for someone a hundred times more tender than I can ever hope to be— _

_ Tender? What do you mistake me for— _

_ And spending every night trying to compose just the right poetry to convince you that this is eternal? _

_ I know it’s eternal! _

_ You don’t believe it though_, Kylo murmured, tone tinged through with rue.

_ I’m trying. _

_ You keep trying to make a full-blown theory out of it. _

_ That’s what I do when I care about something. The cosmos gets precisely the same treatment. _

_ Have you solved me just yet? _

_ I’ve got the rest of my life for that. Though my initial results are that you’re tenderer than you seem to think. _

_ What could possibly— _

_ I’ve seen the calligraphy. _

Kylo stomped his foot, once again scaring the whole of the bridge. Armitage made a show of clenching his jaw and narrowing his eyes to intimidating slits.

Then, in their heads, they kept right on flirting.

.

_ You’re infinitely better than what I deserve. _

It was something Kylo thought too often. Armitage found himself up at nights, running his fingers down Kylo’s chest, striving to compose the poetry that could prove it wasn’t true. They were meant to be together. It was an undoubtable, self-evident, scientific truth.

In one of those nights he found Kylo awake and thinking, inexplicably, of presenting Armitage with a Corusca gem ring.

_ What’s that for? _

_ An old custom from my birth planet Chandrila, that’s all. _

.

Armitage intended to harness his powers and save the galaxy. That was his plan. He hadn’t had much opportunity to execute it, as the war had mostly been running cool since he took up his command.

Until he followed up on an ambiguous tip from an unreliable spy and accidentally tripped into the Resistance’s current base.

“What are your orders, sir?”

Armitage froze, suddenly aware that the base of the Resistance might contain the Resistance’s general, otherwise known as Kylo Ren’s _ mother_.

“We’ve detected a glitch in their shields. Orbital bombardment will be sufficient to destroy the base.”

“I need a moment to confer with a— a confidential source. I will return shortly.”

He spun around and strode away from the bridge. A second later he heard Kylo’s boots, clanking on after him.

_ I didn’t actually mean you. _

_ You’re planning to loop back. _

_ Of course I am. _

_ Because General Organa is present? _

_ Is she? _

Kylo gave a moody exhale, audible even through the mask. _ Yes. _

_ I planned to ruin Snoke before I met you, and the Resistance is a sharp, if unreliable weapon for that purpose. I don’t intend to let it die— _

_ I’d survive, if she died. I’d live on and thrive on sheer willpower. That’s the point of the Dark Side, it doesn’t let you run away from pain, instead it turns pain into power— _

_ You are in no state to kill a parent, _ Armitage snapped. _ I speak from experience. _

As he progressed efficiently to the nearest supply closet, Kylo fell silent and fell a few steps behind.

_ There’s no future for her and me. _

_ Hasn’t she reached out at least three times to get you back? _

_ Yes, but— _

_ Your inability to accept unconditional love concerns me, but at the moment I have more pressing problems. _

Armitage yanked open the closet door and stepped inside. Just as he closed his eyes and was about to clench his fists, Kylo flung it open again and flooded it with light.

“What are you doing?”

“We’re bound, right?”

“Yes?”

“Let’s see whether I can travel back with you. An experiment.”

Armitage’s frown instantly melted.

“All right. I suppose we might hold hands?”

Kylo offered his hands, and Armitage wove their fingers together. Even after the debauchery of their past weeks, this still felt curiously intimate.

“Let’s close our eyes, and hold on tight, and wish we were somewhere else.”

“That’s easy enough,” Kylo muttered darkly.

A frown flickered across Armitage’s face, but he ignored the odd moment and pressed forward.

(Armitage loops)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> What's that they say about longfics where the OTP is happy together a couple chapters in...


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This chapter: _Ex Machina_ rears its bloody head.

Breathless, Armitage waited for his knight to descend from his carriage, and right on time Kylo clanked his way down the shuttle’s ramp. Armitage waited with his arms clasped behind him, a military pose that for once felt safe, even comfortable to him. In a rare reckless moment— Kylo’s influence, no doubt— he acted on instinct and flung forth all his love, unmasked, unconditional, unbounded. He tumbled back towards the forest of his lover’s mind like he was pulled by gravity.

Kylo stopped to stare at him through the mask, instead pushing straight into _ his _ head, and Armitage’s heart jolted as if at an electric spark. There was a guarded feel to Kylo’s exploration this time around. Perhaps it was because they had successfully looped back together, and Kylo only needed a moment to reorient himself—

_ No. _

_ Hm? _

_ Whoever you’re waiting for, that’s not me. Sorry to disappoint. _

“I need to speak with the general,” Kylo announced aloud. “Alone.”

Kylo hurried them both to a nearby conference room. When Armitage pressed the bond, he found a wall of Kylo’s making.

“Why are you—”

Kylo cut him off. “We’ve never met, but you think I want to marry you.”

“Excuse me? I’ve never thought that.“

“That’s the implication of that ring on Chandrila.” He tilted his head to the side. “You think I’m Ben Solo, and you’re a time traveler, and we’re soulmates.”

Armitage blinked. “I. Obviously.”

“You think we’re made for each other.” 

Kylo lifted a hand, and the walls came tumbling down to let a probe through, an abrupt, near-painful invasion of Armitage’s head.

“What are you _ doing_?”

“You’re really perfect for me, aren’t you?” The mask disguised it, but still Armitage heard an oddly snide note in Kylo’s voice.

“I am,” Armitage said, keeping his own voice gentle even as his unease built. He thought momentarily of reaching for one of his weapons and batted away the thought. He had no reason to cross Kylo, and no reason to believe that was a fight he would win.

“You know where the Resistance base is, and you mean to keep that from the Order. You mean to have _ me _ keep that—”

“I maintain you are not prepared for matricide, yes, but—”

“I’m offended,” Kylo breathed, voice crackling through the filter, “that Snoke thinks I’m so easily seduced.”

“That Snoke— what?”

“I’m not falling for the bait.”

Armitage moved to leave the room, only to find himself frozen in place. His eyes widened, and he threw the full force of his mind against Kylo’s walls.

_ Kylo, let me in. _

“I don’t doubt that you’ve been made for me. Engineered, even,” he spat. “The Order’s reconditioning is a marvelous thing.”

_ You have lost your mind! _

“Because I doubt that the Force would present me with a perfect counterpart who already knows who I am, and what I’ve done, and is still delusionally infatuated?”

_ Let me go this instant or— _

“I’ve caught you,” he murmured. “And you had that much right— I always will.”

Armitage could hear the sneer curling that beautiful mouth. Then there was only darkness, and freefall.

.

He awoke, stripped down to his underclothes and suspended in midair, caught in a containment field. Cuffs had been fastened around his ankles and wrists, and bolts of blue electricity crackled up and down his body, tracking sharp pain across his skin. 

Most of his body was frozen— hands open-palmed and paralyzed. Only his face could move. Once he forced his eyes to focus he realized the field was rotating in a darkened prison chamber.

Slowly Snoke slid into view.

“General Hux,” he said, robe rustling on the ground as he stepped forward, fully and frighteningly present. “I must thank you for your tip about the Resistance base. General Organa escaped with a few survivors, but we’ll track them down soon enough.”

“I didn’t—”

“Didn’t you?”

Armitage fell silent.

“Kylo thought you a trap that I had ‘reconditioned’ for him, to test his loyalty. He thought you meant to seduce him from the dark.” He moved ever closer and pressed a leathery finger down Armitage’s bare arm, perhaps tracing a vein in marble skin. “As if you were not born from a darkness deeper than he will ever know. I know better. Don’t I, Hux?”

He spat out the surname, and Armitage shivered from more than the sparks.

“I know the potential of your bloodline even better than you.”

“I don’t—”

A flick of Snoke’s finger, and Armitage’s windpipe closed around the sound.

“Son of darkness,” Snoke said with a playful gleam in his eye. “Darkness of the sun. Kylo Ren had that much right: you are no mere human.”

“I am—”

“You are misplaced in a realm not yours, Armitage Hux. You are a god.”

“That is impossible—”

“And that—” reaching through the current, Snoke’s hand clasped tight around his wrist— “is why you must never go free again.”

.

Once before Snoke had prowled through his head. Then he failed to pierce the false bottom. He had never come close to unraveling Armitage’s secrets, before.

.

When Armitage awoke again he was paralyzed, but not by a containment field. He had been laid on his back on some hard surface and suffused with an unnatural haze, marked only by the beeping of med droids.

Med droids.

He was on an operating table, body locked down by anesthesia, mind awake when it wasn’t meant to be, and a med droid was currently prodding at his intestines.

His eyes refused to open. He tried to sharpen his other senses and became aware of needles piercing his skin, siphoning blood from his every vein.

Faintly, he reached out to Kylo, pressing against the wall in his head.

_ Kylo, it’s me. _

_ Kylo Ren, remove this wall and just give me a chance. _

The tubes kept draining his blood. He hoped it was an illusion, the sense that his power was draining away with it.

_ Ben? _

He received no response. Neither had Leia Organa, when she had petitioned Kylo through the Force so many times before. He had known this, he should have known this, he _ knew _ of Kylo’s inability to accept unconditional love. Of course when he had offered himself so forthrightly, the lust and the hope and the love that he had never bothered to bestow on anyone else, Kylo had retreated to his insecurities and thought it all a trap.

A scalpel slit a clean line up his arm.

For a few weeks he had been foolish, foolish and lucky and naive, and now he was paying the price. He had ignored the one underlying truth of his universe.

He was destined to walk alone.

.

Armitage had to admire Snoke’s dedication as a researcher, even if the ethics of his experiments raised some questions.

Where once Snoke had contented himself with a superficial probe of his mind, now he studied Armitage like an exotic specimen or a forbidden text. Armitage was suspended before his scrutiny, all his layers and loops being peeled back one by one, feet dangling a few inches above the ground, fingers splayed apart by the Force.

Snoke knew the mechanism now. He couldn’t travel without closing his fists, and so his last hope faded away.

“You feared I’d clone you,” Snoke mocked. “It may relieve you to know that the Force does not take kindly to being ordered around thus. Creating life from nothing is possible, but creating a powerful Force-user from nothing? That’s a risky business, and one I’m not in.”

_ So what, _ Armitaged deadpanned in the deafening silence of his own head, _ you intend to steal all my power for yourself? _

Snoke recoiled, features contorting into a hateful sneer, and for an instant Armitage worried he’d physically strike him.

“Kylo Ren,” he said instead. “Heir to Lord Vader. Bring balance to the Force, and _ claim your destiny_.”

Behind Armitage, something hummed. A green glow flared in his periphery.

_ Kylo? Kylo, please— _

_ It’s not real, whatever you think we have. _

_ It is, I don’t know what lies he’s telling you but surely you can feel it, please, I’m not pulling your puppet strings I’m just _

“Only the wrists for now. We might just need to keep him, if the first cycle fails.”

_ Cycle what cycle Kylo please don’t please, I promise there’s a timeline somewhere, sometime where we’re happy— _

Kylo stepped into the center of his vision and lifted the lightsaber, and for a moment Armitage envisioned a Corusca gem.

Crystalline. Brilliant and multifaceted and perfectly cut. He knew from his upbringing by the mines that Corusca gems were terrifically strong, useful in jewelry but more so on the tip of a drill. They were capable of scratching almost any other stone in the galaxy.

Yet, he reflected, the intricate lattice structure that gave a Corusca gem its strength made it curiously brittle. If one could find the tiniest flaw, a feather, a shatterpoint, they could drive a blade deep into it and split the gem in two.

Kylo drove his saber down and split Armitage cleanly into three pieces. 

_ we could have been happy _

.

Armitage needed to close his fists to time-travel, and so there was a certain elegance to Snoke’s solution. He could hardly close his fists if he had no fists to close.

He had been locked in a cell. There was a research lab somewhere nearby. He was being stored on some ship or planet, and carefully kept from any clues that could identify _ where_. The technology seemed to be cobbled together from multiple sources— First Order, old Imperial tech, some devices he couldn’t recognize at all.

Between his relative lack of medical training and the fact that he was kept drugged into a compliant state of static at all times, he couldn’t guess what any of it was meant to do.

The drugs kept the worst of the terror at bay. In its place the fog of sorrow crept in, an awareness that already his few days of crystalline happiness seemed an eternity ago. 

He had never liked needles. Now they were everywhere.

Intravenous needles had been tucked into his wrist, forcing water and nutrients and drugs into him, periodically knocking him out. He assumed that was when the bulk of the experiments took place. The rest of the time he lay sluggish in a small gray cell lit by a bulb too high for him to reach.

When he looked down at where his hands used to be, he found scarred stumps and two marks branded into his forearms like cuffs. Each mark showed an equilateral triangle, blackened at the vertices, with a circle inscribed in the center and lettering he couldn’t make out.

With a sigh he let his arms drop down again.

.

He forgot what he was fighting for. He lay against the wall and relinquished his brain to a vaguely melancholy blank. A strange nothingness had settled upon him, a certainty that nothing would ever happen again. Perhaps time went on as usual everywhere else in the galaxy, but it was locked out of his particular cell.

.

“Hux. Hux.”

_ What? _

The question drifted into a void.

“Armitage, wake up.”

He forced himself out of the darkness. Kylo looked back at him, mask removed to reveal pathetically wide eyes.

“You’ve come for the death blow?” Armitage slurred, crisp diction melted to sludge.

“What? No. No, Snoke’s launching a final attack on the Resistance, and you were right. I’m not strong enough for matricide.”

Armitage shrugged. “My apologies.”

“I need you to travel back in time.”

His head lolled to the side. “You believe me now.”

“It was all real, everything you said,” Kylo said breathlessly.

His eyes turned glossy with tears, and that snapped Armitage partway from his haze.

He snapped, “What gave it away?”

“How I feel now that it’s been broken,” he replied with an earnestness Armitage wanted to loathe. “You can feel it, can’t you? It snuck up on me. But the bond must’ve been real, for it to hurt this way now.”

“Scintillating logic.”

“It feels like I amputated something, and was left to dangle.”

“You feel like you amputated something?” Armitage deadpanned. “You’re not wrong.”

“You’re still sarcastic.” Kylo smiled, a pure, impossible contrast with the tears in his eyes. “I’m thankful for that.”

Armitage sighed. “If you want time travel, trick Snoke into it. That’s what he wanted, isn’t it? To steal the Hux blood—”

“Yes,” Kylo interrupted, “but the first three cycles of his experiments all failed. He’s still trying the transfusions again, and these old Sith rituals that I don’t want to know more about…” He swallowed hard, his whole ridiculous face scrunching up. “But it hasn’t worked yet for him. Something about how your proteins are folded differently.”

Armitage snorted. “Small mercies. Still doesn’t fix the fact that I need hands to time travel, and you so kindly relieved me of those.”

“About that.” Kylo stood up suddenly, rummaging around in his coat. He pulled out two complex-looking devices with wires hanging off the end. Armitage squinted.

“Are those _ prosthetics? _”

“I try to keep a pair around,” he mumbled. “Family superstition.”

Calculating the odds that Kylo would be able to properly fit him with the prosthetics intensified the throb in Armitage’s head. Finally he determined that Kylo would hardly be able to make his arms _ worse_. He raised the two stubs.

They fell into silence as Kylo pulled out a few more tools and attempted the procedure. He removed his gloves and set to work, hands rough but impossibly tender. The hands of a fellow mechanic.

Armitage couldn’t breathe.

“The bond seems to be gone,” Kylo observes as he plugged the final wires into place. “It feels like your end got, um, singed off.”

“I really can’t imagine why.”

“Me neither,” he joked, eyebrows jumping. His voice cracked halfway through, and he stared resolutely down at his work to hide how he was crying. “But the point is that _ I _ can hardly feel you now. Maybe nobody else can. You’re almost entirely closed off from the Force, no rational creature can reach you without causing you both damage, and in your line of work that might just be an advantage.”

“My line of work.” Armitage shook his head, lips pursed together tight against his own tears. “What’s the point of it? The galaxy can save itself or it can burn, what have _ I _ got to do with it—”

“No, that’s not you,” Kylo murmured. “It’s the drugs or, or the pain. Not you.”

He lifted a hand, then retracted it. When Armitage looked at him in silent pleading, Kylo gave a jerky nod and reached out to cup his face.

“Promise me you’ll keep fighting? Long as it takes?”

Armitage met his eyes and stayed silent.

“I’m sorry. For everything, always. But mainly—” Kylo’s tongue darted out to wet those lips, chapped and bloodied where his teeth had worried them— “I’m sorry I’m not whoever you need me to be, right now.”

He rose.

“You can stay,” Armitage blurted. “The magic didn’t count you as another person for some reason, I’ve looped before with you in the room.”

“That was before the— the break,” Kylo said, swallowing hard. “We shouldn’t risk it. And I’ll be back if—”

He left unspoken the fact that Armitage’s time travel had always been bound up in Kylo’s fate. That his powers might have wholly abandoned him when Kylo did.

“I’ll do my best,” Armitage said.

“You always do.”

Kylo jerked again, as if to make some last pronouncement or some final gesture, only to awkwardly stop himself and shuffle out of the room, tools tucked back into his robes. Before he left, he overloaded the room’s single lightbulb with a snap of his fingers. The glass shattered, jagged fragments scattering all across the floor, and though Armitage flinched he couldn’t escape them all.

He tucked his head down into his knees and closed his prosthetic fists.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Alert! There was a highly important pun in this chapter.
> 
> Here were alternative bad summaries I came up with:
> 
> "a masterclass in how not to write a soulmate story"  
"look, I really like Snoke here but I realize I might be in the minority"  
"this chapter: the reason AO3 kicks me off their site"


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter: ex-soulmates and abused thermostats.

**Part III**

Armitage had from time to time reckoned with multivariate indefinite integrals. The theoretical complement of the derivative, they collapsed complex shapes into something flatter and easier to manage. They marginalized extra dimensions, erasing them from existence, hiding the complexity of what was there before.

In the jagged dissonant quiet of his lightless cell, Armitage wondered if it’d be easier that way. If he ought to surrender, if he ought to resign himself to an existence as Snoke’s lab rat. If he ought to recondition himself immediately should he succeed in looping back, and wipe out any trace of anything more than “General Hux, devoted servant of the First Order.”

(Armitage loops)

Integration was, naturally, a meaningless dream. Armitage’s soulmate had betrayed him, and the near-paradoxical irony had shattered him. There was no integrating these pieces back together into a coherent whole without undoing the crack in the first place, but the damage was on his side, branded into his psyche, and he would carry that for eternity. No matter where he traveled, no matter how far forward or backward he looped, he would never forget.

Exiting his Upsilon-class shuttle into the _ Finalizer’s _ hangar, Kylo stumbled.

“Lord Ren,” a lieutenant piped up, “welcome to the Finalizer—”

“I need a moment alone.”

“Of course, your quarters are—”

Kylo walked past them all, not even sparing Armitage a second glance.

“I—” Armitage’s voice failed him. “I need a moment alone.”

Only when he’d dashed out of the hangar, halfway up a hallway in the opposite direction, did he notice that he’d echoed Kylo perfectly. Second nature, he supposed.

.

He reported himself ill. The last time he played hooky, it had been to study the curves and planes of Kylo’s body. Now Armitage locked himself in his quarters alone.

His rooms were brutally clean. He kept them how his father might, all right angles and tight creases. There was no hint of personality haunting the room, only gaberwool coats in the closet and tins full of tarine tea in the cupboard— a flavor favored by Imperials that he had always found too bitter. He had erased every hint of his real self from his physical surroundings, from his everyday demeanor. He wouldn’t have minded, might have even exulted in the theatre of it all, if he hadn’t had one sip of being truly _ seen_.

Now his quarters just seemed empty.

He dragged himself over to the refresher mirror and saw a pile of rubble. Eyes that might’ve been bloodshot even before the tears struck. Pasty skin pulled tight over too-sharp bones, like the stray cats he vaguely remembered wandering about Arkanis. He had regressed to his days as a hapless child. Once again, perhaps unavoidably, he was “thin as a slip of paper and just as useless.”

Brendol had always had a way with words.

Armitage’s comlink let out an urgent beep, and he tore his stare away to check the message.

_ Lord Ren appears lost in a Dark Side Force rage. _

_ He has ignited his lightsaber and damaged Level 2’s thermostat control panel beyond repair. _

A second later: _ Captain Phasma has set up a perimeter and prepared to use tranquilizers in the case of threat to personnel. _

Armitage turned the comlink off with a snort.

They were both spiraling, like two halves of a ship sent careening through space when the bonds between them had broken. Kylo wouldn’t know the reason why he felt this way. He would only know the isolation, the creeping pain that was now prompting him to destroy his surroundings.

For his part, Armitage knew the reason too well.

If he were an ordinary Hux, he would have already pilfered tranquilizers off his medbay to anesthetize himself, or broken into the bootleg liquor he had confiscated from his troopers. If he were his father, he would summon a particularly doe-eyed officer and beat them senseless.

He closed his eyes for a moment and pictured Lieutenant Mitaka’s face bashed in. He tried to summon the exhilaration of exorcising his rage and the catharsis that might follow.

All he could manage was weariness. Underneath it loomed an indefinite despair.

His eyes drifted back open, an acknowledgement of the simple fact that anger largely eluded him now; his heart had calcified during those languorous years on Dassal Prime. Yet an old fury flickered, tongued at the base of his skull, carving deeper than he thought himself capable. 

He let his gaze roam up and down his wretched reflection for a minute more before punching the mirror. It shattered, lines spidering out from the point of impact. He plucked the largest sliver from the whole. Neatly rolled up a sleeve. Pressed the jagged edge into his forearm.

With some pressing, the trickle of blood strengthened into a tidy stream. He watched the flow with a blank face and wondered if this was really the ichor of gods. If all his magic and ill-starred luck were pouring neatly down the drain, rendered useless to match the rest of him.

(Armitage loops)

“Lord Ren,” a lieutenant piped up, “welcome to the Finalizer—”

“I need a moment alone.”

“Of course, your quarters are—”

Kylo lumbered past them all, not even sparing Armitage a second glance.

Armitage narrowed his eyes and watched him stalk out. Once Kylo was out of earshot, he murmured, “You may all return to your ordinary duties. I will handle this situation myself.”

His arms were pristine. Still his head felt too light as he proceeded by a circuitous route to the second-floor thermostat. Perhaps it was suicide, confronting Kylo without backup, but he also knew well enough that a show of armed force might just get all his troops killed off.

His comlink beeped. Kylo had commenced his invasion of the heating control room.

When he arrived he waited outside the door, listening to the muffled yells. Cries, more specifically, the rawness of Kylo’s voice overloading the mask’s filter, breaking up into distorted wordless static. It was echoed by the static that had settled into Armitage’s ears from the instant their bond had broken. 

Among the cries came the stench of scorched metal, and the sizzle of a saber meeting highly sophisticated First Order equipment. Patient, Armitage waited for this storm to run its course.

In time Kylo powered his saber off and stepped outside. His shoulders were still held too high, bunched up like coiled springs. His fists were curled closed in their gloves. An imminent threat.

“Who the hell are you?”

“General Hux.” He meant to hurl the name like a blaster bolt. General Hux always barked out his words, but all Armitage could manage when standing face-to-mask with Kylo was a carefully studied neutrality.

“What do you want?”

“I assume you’re torturing random devices for reasons of the Force.” When Kylo answered him with silence he continued, “Perhaps that’s necessary, but I was hoping to brainstorm some more…cost-effective alternatives.”

“Like what?” he snarled.

“Perhaps you might spar with our dedicated practice droids—”

Kylo cut him off with an abrupt step forward, pressing his back against the wall, and Armitage could only gaze at him, pulse racing.

“_You _ don’t understand the dark side.”

“I never claimed to,” Armitage breathed, voice suddenly streaked through with melancholy. 

“How long were you standing out here?”

“A few minutes.”

He tensed further, and Armitage had learned enough of his posture to guess he was scowling. 

“Did you not sense me?”

“Your presence in the Force,” Kylo sneered, “is remarkably weak.”

Kylo twisted it into an insult, likely to cover up his alarm. Armitage gaped for a moment, frozen by the scent of danger, waiting for Kylo to once again knock him out and hand-deliver him to Snoke.

“Could you...” Armitage paused with slackened lips, eyes flitting down to Kylo’s shoes one time as his brain got caught in a loop, a sudden unwanted flood of memories. “Could you inform me if you manage to identify some less destructive habits?”

Kylo snorted. “If I do, I’ll let you know.”

.

At the end of his shift, Armitage returned to his quarters, cast his coat on a seat and brewed himself a cup of tarine tea. While he tied up loose ends of the day’s business, the drink steeped, becoming stronger than usual. He usually made weak cups to limit the bitterness, but today acridity seemed apropos.

Three knocks sounded from his door, harsh and arrhythmic. He opened it. Kylo pushed inside past him. Armitage’s hand burned where that tattered cowl brushed it.

“I have a new habit to try.”

“Might I ask what?”

“You.”

Armitage flinched. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“Ah, but you do.”

“You read it in my thoughts?” An unfamiliar feeling flared: hope, burning through his chest.

“Barely. I read it in your eyes. Any First Order general has to have a ‘lust for power.’ I suppose yours is just particularly literal.”

Armitage flushed. “That’s not—”

“Or maybe it’s armor. The coat?”

“No!”

“I can keep it on, if you’d like.”

Armitage’s mouth went dry. He grabbed his cup and took one more sip to stall. “No. That won’t be necessary.”

Armitage knew Kylo. Knew his prior sexual habits. He had had plenty of flings and one-night dalliances, nothing Armitage could have mistaken for serious attachment. They had been alike in that respect. 

Armitage stepped forward to undo Kylo’s belt. 

He knew Kylo’s preferences all too well. In the past, Kylo liked the illusion of power in a partner, and he further enjoyed the process of stripping away that illusion. It wasn’t a matter of sadism, like he pretended. Kylo simply needed to reassure himself that there was nothing frightening under the surface. There was no monster under the bed. Nothing to compete with the feral beast he thought himself.

Though Armitage had undue practice removing Kylo’s armor, his fingers trembled at the belt buckle.

The first two times they met, before their bond was warped beyond recognizability, Kylo had appreciated the honest insight into Armitage’s head. Though it surprised him, he had found comfort in the black creature concealed just under Armitage’s placid surface. It was the joy of meeting a fellow beast in an empty wilderness— an equal. They had been equally afraid of breaking everything they touched. Rightly so, it seemed.

Kylo lifted his gloved hands to Armitage’s collar, smoothly undoing the fasteners. Armitage gasped at the touch.

Now, Kylo Ren would only see General Hux— a fragile construct that would surely shatter under rough handling. He’d break through to the person underneath, and because Armitage wouldn’t risk exposing himself as a saboteur again, all he’d find was a quivering one-dimensional child. Kylo’d have his fun and swagger away with that awful curl to his lip, abandoning one more lover to the darkness.

Still Armitage tugged off Kylo’s belt and moved to his ridiculously intricate coat.

Kylo Ren couldn’t accept unconditional love from Armitage, once his devotion had flared from a spark into a raging fire. If General Hux offered anything similar, Kylo would laugh in his face, or turn him in to Snoke for sleeping his way to the throne, or possibly run him through with the saber.

Armitage suddenly abandoned the coat. Instead he lifted his hands and reached straight for the mask, fingers finding the latch instantly—

Only to be frozen in place.

“Is this,” Kylo said, “why you brought me here?”

_ Yes_, he screamed into the unhearing void. _ Yes, yes, a thousand times yes because my whole world is warmed when I see your face. _

Aloud he said, “I don’t know what you mean.”

“You just wanted to figure out who I am, and how you can control me.”

“I— have you ever been accused of paranoia?”

“Of lacking it.”

_ I will never sneak up on you, and exploit your vulnerabilities, and kill you while you sleep_, Armitage thought, with no way in the real world to prove it.

Kylo stepped back and continued to disrobe, undoing his own cloak. The mask he left untouched. 

“Excuse me,” Armitage muttered. He felt Kylo’s eyes on him, suspicion hot against his back as he stepped into his darkened refresher and shut the door.

(Armitage loops)

This time Armitage entered the thermostat control room, bending to dodge a cloud of red sparks.

“What do you want?” Kylo growled without turning.

“When you’re quite done with your reign of terror,” Armitage said coolly, “I wondered if I might have a turn.”

Kylo paused, tilting his head in what might’ve been anger. Armitage wanted to interpret it as curiosity, but his interpretations had their flaws.

With one blunt movement Kylo powered off the green saber and thrust his gloved hand out, offering Armitage the hilt. He took it.

Then Armitage rapidly turned away, because even through his own glove the sword’s hilt seared him. He felt as if he had been struck through the heart with its beam. Kylo had told him of this, how a kyber crystal was linked to its master’s heart.

Kylo’s mind had been like a forest. Armitage imagined he could see all the foliage once more— the kyber crystal in his hands surely shone leaf-green— but the visual was gone in an instant. He turned the hilt over, caressing Kylo’s heart, and tried to convince himself it was the last time.

Then he glanced up at the control panel, slashed and smoking but still intact. It still beeped and flashed its lights. Reaching deep into his engineering background, he performed a silent in-depth analysis of its structure and shatterpoints, and re-ignited the weapon.

With one sure stroke he pierced the machine through the center, making one clean wound. Instantly the machine’s displays went dark. The underlying processes died.

Kylo gawped at him.

“Hmph,” Armitage muttered, forcing himself to return the lightsaber. “You understand I cannot officially condone the destruction of First Order property.”

“Of course not,” Kylo deadpanned.

“So if a list makes its way to you of ideal equipment for you to destroy, I’d appreciate if you kept it to yourself.”

Kylo recoiled. “What’s in it for you?”

“There are multiple upgrades available. We could use an excuse to order them early.”

Kylo snorted, caught between irritation and puzzlement. It was as good a first impression as General Hux could expect to make.

“As you were,” he said with the slightest smirk, careful not to let his stare linger. Then he swept elegantly out of the room.

.

He watched Kylo from afar. Though caught on the same ship, they drifted apart.

Armitage played the general, brusque and driven and pragmatic as always. Though he couldn’t be close to Kylo, he hated the idea of devolving into his outright enemy, and so he needed Kylo’s respect— not an easy prize. Armitage knew his history with authority figures. The son of Han Solo and Leia Organa was hardly inclined to respect a general.

He therefore kept Kylo off-balance. He responded to Kylo’s attitude with enough grace and serenity to shock him back to adulthood. He stood up firmly for his crew when Kylo threatened their interests and windpipes. He consistently devoted his spare time to improving Kylo’s personal tech— minor enhancements, but technically tricky. He improved Kylo’s mask to protect against more toxins, and applied the latest flame-proofing techniques to his absurdly complex coat, and disabled the TIE fighter auto-stabilizers that kept pilots from spinning madly.

“You’re not terrible as an engineer,” Kylo remarked after that last trick saved him in battle.

“What a pity,” he replied without looking up from his datapad. “I was hoping the Supreme Leader promoted me out of some deep-hidden charitable instinct.”

He let his sense of humor have slightly freer rein around Kylo, though every snort he won tangled up his heartstrings.

It hurt worse when Kylo stayed quiet, as he did now. It took him a moment of silent contemplation before he replied, “I’m starting to see why the Supreme Leader thinks so highly of you.”

“It took you long enough,” he replied, because General Hux of the First Order would.

Meanwhile Armitage screamed into the void.


	9. Chapter 9

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This chapter: I drank too much tarine tea!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> No, really, I wrote this on-site and racked up one hell of a drink bill.

Now pure science reminded Armitage of Kylo— the way they had laughed and played at research in his bed— so for the time being physics brought him no relief. He turned to work for distraction.

The Knights of Ren turned up intelligence that eluded all of the First Order’s ordinary sources— reports of coaxium hyperfuel being smuggled at record levels into the Unknown Regions. Armitage’s first instinct was to check whether the First Order itself was responsible for the movement, but the official records showed that they had shifted almost all their supply orders to legitimate channels. He contacted the Supreme Leader to ask whether the Order had been operating some covert engineering project outside his notice. Snoke denied it.

“Do you know who is behind this?”

“The details are shrouded even from my sight,” Snoke mused with an ominous scowl.

“The _ Finalizer’s _ course is already headed for the edge of the galaxy,” Armitage observed. “Might I investigate further?”

“If the opportunity presents itself.”

.

“Ohnaka is one of the best-known fuel smugglers in this part of the galaxy, and he’s recruiting engineers at an unprecedented rate,” a soldier announced at a briefing on the Order’s covert operations. Armitage was present, with Kylo at his side in person and several other officers attending by hologram.

“Engineers?” Armitage frowned. “Because his ships are taking unusual amounts of damage?”

“Indeed. The damage reported by local parts dealers is consistent with the known dangers of hauling coaxium in...non-regulation conditions.”

Kylo snorted.

“The Resistance shouldn’t be able to afford all this,” Armitage said. “But perhaps a powerful Force-sensitive could negotiate the prices. And the preliminary evidence from the search for Skywalker—“ he let his stare flick to Kylo— “does point to the Unknown Regions.”

“So now we think Skywalker’s alive and building himself a new Rebellion fleet?” snorted Captain Pryde. Like Armitage, she was the child of a much-decorated Imperial officer, though her own father had deserted just before Jakku and disappeared into the ether. Like Luke Skywalker, the elder Pryde was presumed dead.

“We can’t conclude that,” Armitage warned. “To hear our intelligence agents tell it, we can’t even conclude that there’s any unusual coaxium movements at all.”

“Have we entirely infiltrated Ohnaka’s operation?” Pryde asked, flatly ignoring him.

The representative shifted in her seat, now disconcerted. “His missions tend towards the hazardous side. We’ve sent in five operatives, and lost five operatives to crashes and inter-group disputes.”

“Get a sixth one in,” Pryde barked.

“They’re only taking engineers,” she protested. “And with the Canto Bight mission, I don’t have any spies free with the clearance level _ and _ the technical background to be plausible. Ohnaka doesn’t let in just anyone—“

“I have a plausible candidate,” Armitage murmured, taking momentary leave of his senses. “Me.”

Every head swiveled towards him. He ignored all but Kylo’s, whose stare was clearly incredulous even through the mask.

“I have the clearance and the technical background,” he continued on smoothly, as if nothing was out of the ordinary. “My ship is already engaged in business nearby—“

“Sir,” the representative interrupted, “with all due respect, you have not undergone the relevant training—“

“You think I can’t spin a convincing lie?” He smirked, thinking of his background— not to mention the overblown propaganda speeches he had to now deliver.

“This is not just a matter of one lie,” she sputtered. “Rather, an Order spy must train for years to dissemble so thoroughly that they can completely convince a trained observer of their role, even while keeping true to their real strategic agenda at all times. The layers of deception, the sheer cognitive dissonance is too much to require of someone untrained.”

“If Hux is willing, why not let him make the sacrifice?” Pryde jumped in with a saccharine show of deference, confirming his suspicion that she wanted him dead.

He answered her with an obsequious nod. Then he added drily, “I’ll take the risk.”

.

Armitage arranged for an unmarked craft to take him down to Batuu.

He was off-balance. Had been since it went wrong with Kylo. It was the only explanation for how he’d landed on this risible mission, out of uniform with an unfamiliar beard covering his cheeks. His features had never been particularly memorable, and Order propaganda focused more on other officers. The beard and scruffy hair— combined with a Republic accent and a sunny smile— would protect him almost entirely from recognition.

Ohnaka’s job interview came in the form of a ship whose hull had collapsed in on itself— sucked into one spot and scrambled, in the telltale pattern of a coaxium explosion. Armitage was tasked with combing through the wreckage for all salvageable parts. He flashed the supervisor a grin and got straight to work, humming all the while. He kept his wide-brimmed hat askew and the buttons on his collar undone in a manner delightfully unfitting for a general.

It was a simple task, and he performed it well— giving Ohnaka Transport Solutions a few thousand credits’ worth of free service in the process. Once he had finished, the supervisor clapped him on the back.

“Amazing. You’re the second-best we’ve had all day.”

“The second— _ what_?”

She mistook his squawk for pleasure and beamed at him. “Ohnaka will meet with you both in person tonight—“

“But—“

“At the local cantina, you can’t miss it!”

.

Pushing past a crowd of natives, Armitage stepped over an unidentified puddle into the cantina and found a lightless void.

Chaos. He had stepped into pure chaos, a mass of bodies packed far too close together in pitch-black darkness, all shrieking for someone to hit something, and Armitage reflexively raised his hands to cover his face until he realized they were haranguing the bartender in some sort of well-practiced war-cry. In response, the bartender banged a hyperdrive standing out of place in the middle of a civilian establishment, and the whole bar flared back to light.

In an instant Armitage wished for the darkness again.

The lurid lighting exposed a horror show— rust on the pipes that carried the liquor, a bulbous amphibian judging all the patrons from its tank, and enough exposed wiring on the ceiling to have the whole building condemned. The air resounded with the sort of dissonant clanging that the Republic regularly mistook for music, and the floor glimmered with a sticky sheen Armitage opted not to investigate.

He scowled once more at the hyperdrive— massive overkill for a cantina, as power sources went— and considered aborting the mission. Someone shoved him aside, and his hand flew to his blaster before he looked and recognized his backup, an elite set of Order soldiers who had also infiltrated the trading post to ensure his security.

“Out of my way, scum.” Dressed in plainclothes with her platinum hair gleaming openly, Captain Phasma smirked down at him and gave him another push, clearly enjoying her role.

He snorted and moved away, carving out a spot for himself at the central bar. 

As he perused the menu, his ear adjusted to the music, identifying a systematic rhythm and melody. Then he began to see logical patterns everywhere, in the natural ebb and flow of conversation, the cycle of placing orders and waiting and drinking and paying— or dashing away without leaving a single credit. Outside Kylo’s memories, he had never seen a spectacle like this before.

He stared down at a menu full of drinks he had heard about but never before had legitimate access to. It took a few tries to summon a server— General Hux would succeed with one bark, but Armitage preferred the gentler approach— and with only a few stumbles he managed to place an order. It was such a simple interaction. Still there was heady power in it. In all his lives, he had never been to a restaurant or bar.

He let out an exhale and a smile once his drink successfully arrived. Life bubbled on around him, raucous and disorganized and _ normal_, and for a moment he let himself pretend it was real. That he was just another smuggler, with a choice in drinks and a choice in jobs. One more smuggler with an ugly history to be hidden away in a distant past. One more engineer with a real future to hope for, outrunning all his troubles easily in the infinite expanse of space.

“You here for work?” A voice sounded beside him, an Imperial accent he instinctively thought out-of-place and hateful.

“What gave it away?” Maintaining his own rolling Republic tone, Armitage turned to his conversation partner and did his best not to choke.

“The fact that you’re drinking breakfast tea.” He smiled, and it took all Armitage’s willpower not to stare at those lips. “I’m Ben, by the way.”

Armitage blinked, and then reached out to shake his hand. “I’m Caleb.”

“Any last name?”

“Depends. What’s yours?”

Kylo’s unmasked face split into an easy, silly grin, and Armitage did his best not to shatter into a thousand pieces again. “Forget the last names, then. How’s that tea?”

“Better than tarine tea has any right to be. They sweetened it past the point of recognition.”

It was garnished with a plump gooseberry that he popped in his mouth, aware of Kylo’s eyes following the motion.

“Do you drink an awful lot of tarine tea?” Kylo asked without missing a beat.

“By the ton.”

“Why, if you dislike it?”

“For the flimsy pretense of sophistication,” he replied promptly, buoyed by the fact that it was the absolute truth. 

All the muscles in Kylo’s face jumped as he worked to separate fact from fiction. As far as he knew, the great General Hux couldn’t know Kylo’s face. Couldn’t know that Kylo Ren and Ben Solo were one and the same. This was the game they were both playing at, a flimsy pretense that they were each an anonymous man meeting another anonymous man in the shadowy comfort of a cantina.

“If you’re looking to expand your palette…” Kylo trailed off and nudged his own cocktail towards him.

Armitage had experimented with alcohol before, a few covert swigs in his first adolescence, a few glasses under his father’s supervision in later years. He had enough experience to know his natural tolerance was considerable— an upside to the Hux blood. Kylo couldn’t know that.

So he took a dainty sip and pretended to cough on the harsh liquor. “I think I need more experience.”

“Maybe I could help you with that.”

“If I didn’t know better—” Armitage retreated to his tea, swirling a finger around the glass’s rim— “I’d treat that as a clumsy but well-intentioned seduction attempt.”

“But you do know better?”

“Always. I’m here for work.”

“Ohnaka Transport?”

Armitage lifted an eyebrow.

Kylo shrugged in response. “I was told they liked another engineer today.”

Mid-way through swallowing, Armitage did choke this time on his laughter— of course Ben Solo had beaten him when it came to salvaging broken ships. He had grown up trying to keep the Millennium Falcon from splintering mid-hyperspace-jump.

“A lucky coincidence,” Armitage said upon recovering. “Are you planning to take the job?”

“It’ll depend on what Ohnaka offers. I’ve got other bonds not easily broken. What about you?”

“I’m on the same ship as you,” Armitage replied merrily. “I’ve got a galaxy to save, you see, it’s hard to fit traipsing around the Unknown Regions into the schedule.”

“A galaxy to save. Are you with the Resistance?”

“If I was would I be likely to tell you? For all I know you’re a First Order general in disguise.”

For a moment Kylo’s lips twitched, and Armitage wondered if he had pushed their masquerade too far.

“On the other hand,” Armitage mused more seriously, “I’d love to take this job.”

“You would?”

“A fresh start, with semi-honest work and a paycheck and the freedom to go wherever I wanted, and be whoever I wanted on the other side? Can you imagine anything better?”

He watched carefully, evaluating the reaction, and Kylo replied at first with a face of stone.

“I—” he swallowed and began again, stuttering but solemn. “I don’t think I can.”

So hope still lived in the galaxy.

A bartender rolled up to check on them.

“Caleb. May I buy you a drink?”

Armitage pretended to mull it over. “Yes, I’ll have whatever you’re having. But is this a friendly gesture between potential work colleagues, or are you just angling to besmirch my honor?”

“You sure—” his Imperial accent slipped, just for a second— “you’ve got honor left to besmirch?”

“There’s always farther to fall,” he said. “I speak from experience.”

Kylo’s eyebrows jumped, and the conversation turned wholly sexual once again. ”So you _ are _ experienced, then?”

“If I chose, I could blow your mind more thoroughly than the coaxium blew through those ships today.”

Kylo rolled his eyes. “So I’d be broken and ruined on the other side?” 

Armitage leaned in close— so they could hear each other over the din, he told himself. “Ruined for anyone else, yes.”

“But you don’t choose.”

“Hm?”

“You think you’re not going to choose me,” Kylo said with a minxish smile. “For reasons I still don’t understand.”

His hand brushed Armitage’s back. Where he touched it, there was a spark like static where remnants of their bond were still echoing, flailing about in their pitiful death throes.

“I’m not looking to have my heart broken again.”

“Again?” Kylo began stroking one teasing finger in a line down his back, and Armitage shot Phasma a quick shake of the head, silently ordering her not to intervene. “What happened last time?”

“I don’t kiss and tell.”

“But you want to.”

Armitage threw him a warning glance.

“Were they a real scoundrel?” Kylo prompted.

“He was a fake scoundrel.”

“Really?”

“A complete fraud of a villain. I could’ve been furious with him.”

“Something tells me you had him dismembered and scattered across a couple quadrants.”

Armitage scoffed. “He’s currently healthy, in possession of all his limbs and as happy as he ever gets. Probably drinking in a cantina just like this one right now.”

“Really?”

Armitage answered his naked skepticism with a frown of naked confusion. “I’m generally not one for unnecessary bloodshed. Haven’t got the stomach for it.”

All absolutely true for Armitage, but Kylo was gawping at his general, itching to call a bluff.

Still he kept up the mask. “What’d you see in this man?”

“He was witty like you.”

“Good to know.”

“And quick on his feet like you,” Armitage breathed, “and a clever engineer like you, and handsome and kind and _ magnetic like—“ _

He cut himself off and took a swig from his newly arrived drink, aware that he had played a bad move. This game required strategy more intricate than any round of Dejarik. It had turned into a particularly twisted game of Moebius. 

Kylo gave him a sympathetic smile and attempted to give him a way out. “Maybe I should ask how he’s _ not _like me.”

Silence stretched taut.

“He broke things,” Armitage intoned. “On purpose but more often on accident, and he projected his childhood trauma on every scene regardless of whether it was relevant, and he lived entirely on a diet of self-delusion. All of which a gentleman like you would know...nothing about.”

Kylo downed the rest of his drink in one burning gulp. Armitage did the same and strongly considered looping back in time just to erase the past few minutes. What a pity he couldn’t bleach them from his own memory.

“Ah, there you are!”

They both jumped up as Hondo Ohnaka— a Weequay man about their height, with an elegant red coat Armitage almost envied— wedged himself between them.

“My two new engineers.” He clapped them both on the back. “Let’s settle on a five-percent cut for you both and I’ll have you off on ships at dawn—“

“Hold on,” Armitage said, just as Kylo let out a phrase he thought he’d never hear: “Maybe we should stop and think this through.”

When Ohnaka fell silent, Kylo barreled on in his gruff Imperial accent. “After all, I know what we’re worth to you. Two engineers of our caliber? We should be getting fifteen percent at the least.”

Armitage frowned for a moment before grasping the strategy. Pasting on his pleasantest smile, he doubled down on his affable Republic persona and painted as sharp of a contrast with Kylo as he could. “_I _ might be able to make do with ten percent, but not without a lot more details.”

“Details,” Ohnaka repeated, suddenly sounding nervous.

“Just the basics. Where are we going?”

“Wild space.”

“Could you be less specific?” Kylo muttered.

“I don’t deal with any particular system. There is a drop-off point in the Gradilis sector, a ship will be waiting, I don’t ask further questions.”

“But who even lives out in the Unknown Regions, aren’t they uninhabited?” asked Armitage.

“There’s those blue humans,” Kylo supplied. “The Chess?”

Armitage suppressed a snort. The _ Chiss _ inhabited the Unknown Regions, not the “Chess,” but it wasn’t a bad theory once you put the mispronunciation aside. The Chiss kept quiet when they could— though they had allied with the Empire, it had taken the Order years to earn their notice, and even now their notice had failed to translate into anything of substance. There had been Chiss activity in the Gradilis sector in the past, and the Chiss network extended through the Republic, frequently in the form of criminal rings. Ohnaka could well be one of their puppets.

“Them, yes,” Ohnaka said, “all blue except for those blood-red eyes?” He shuddered. “Don’t mean to be racist, but those eyes give me the creeps.”

Armitage gave an absent-minded nod as if this meant nothing to him. In truth this information raised as many questions as it answered, because the Chiss kept to themselves and played defense whenever possible. Why they would gather enough coaxium for a major fleet escaped him—

“Is it safe, hauling coaxium through wild space?” he mused aloud. “I’d worry about bad maps, landing somewhere you’re not supposed to.“

“Well, that’s what engineers are for— wait a moment.” Ohnaka narrowed his eyes. “Who told you about the coaxium?”

Kylo rescued him. “Those explosion patterns weren’t exactly subtle.”

Ohnaka scoffed. “This is true. And it’s why I’m getting out of the fuel business. You’ll be hauling something just as valuable, and much less flammable. I hope.”

Armitage frowned in genuine confusion, as there wasn’t much that could match coaxium for sheer value. He thought of Corusca gems and nearly laughed aloud— as if those were worth anything to anyone.

He fixed Ohnaka under wide innocent eyes. “Like what?”

“Ah, well,” he grumbled, “I’m not sure you should know that just yet.”

“Tell us,” Kylo said with a lazy wave of his hand, “I mean, who are _ we _going to tell?”

Perhaps it was the mind trick or simply the weight of Kylo’s stare, but Ohnaka relented. “All right. I need you both to get out to Gradilis and deliver some hyperdrive parts.”

“Both of us for one hyperdrive?” Armitage pursed his lips together. “But why not send it off in one ship?”

“Because it won’t fit,” he groaned. “Damn thing needs ten ships at the minimum.”

Ten ships for one hyperdrive.

“The hell are they building?” Kylo voiced what Armitage had been thinking, albeit with stronger swearing. “Another Death Star?”

“Too big.” Both Ohnaka and Kylo looked to him in puzzlement. “Assuming that they’re using up-to-date tech and that all your ships are similar in scale to the one I saw today—“ Ohnaka nodded in response— “this hyperdrive would be overkill on the Death Star. It could power something much larger.”

He threw Kylo a loaded look.

Kylo leaned back with another casual wave of the hand. “You sure you don’t know anything more about it?”

“I told you.” Ohnaka rubbed his neck, increasingly discomfited. “I don’t ask questions. Now what do you say to an eight-percent cut, hm?”

“Gradilis is in wild space, right?” Armitage said hesitantly. “So that means there’ll be electrical storms?”

Ohnaka nodded. “Surely that’s not a problem.”

“Well...I’m afraid of lightning.”

Throwing up his hands, Ohnaka sputtered and then turned to Kylo with a look of pleading.

“So am I,” Kylo promptly replied.

“I’m so sorry—“

“You have my genuine apologies—“

“No,” Ohnaka spat. “No, forget this, I’ll have to find someone else entirely.”

“Yes,” Kylo said with a vigorous nod and one more loaded wave of the hand, “forget all about us. It’s just not going to work out.”

Ohnaka stepped back and stumbled back out of the cantina, looking dazed all the while.

“Are you— are you actually afraid of lightning?”

“What?” Armitage looked back at Kylo. “No, of course not. I just don’t feel like arranging anything like the Alderaan disaster.”

“I can appreciate that.”

Armitage started in on yet another cocktail— Kylo had had their glasses refilled. “So I’m afraid we won’t be working together after all.”

“Which simplifies things if you do decide to choose me for the night.”

“Which I haven’t.”

“What harm could a first kiss do, hm?”

“A last kiss.”

Kylo’s lip quirked to the side. “We’ll see.”

Armitage finished off his drink slowly, stealing time. Stealing glances.

“Why me? There’s a whole cantina of eligible marks.” He tipped his head towards Phasma. “She’s prettier than me.”

“But _ we _ could be electric, and maybe a one-time indulgence would get us both over it.”

A one-time indulgence.

One last kiss.

Methodically Armitage reviewed all the research he had ever conducted. He selected the best angle (his head tilted about twenty degrees to the left), the optimal intensity (cyclical, soft and hard and soft again), precisely the right amount of tongue (none to start, to be updated as the experiment progressed). Then he took in a deep breath and drowned himself.

Electric.

Kylo wasn’t wrong. There was still electricity here, short-circuiting Armitage’s nerves, coupled with the tears that struggled up in his throat and threatened to strangle him. Kylo turned them both about, pressing the counter into Armitage’s back, slotting their hips together and interlacing their fingers. They both panted openly as if they were really just two nameless smugglers in a shadowy bar, with no concerns outside the present point in space-time.

Armitage pulled back.

“Promise me.”

“Anything.”

Calmly but firmly, Armitage detangled himself from Kylo’s limbs. “Promise me you’ll try not to do anything terribly foolish.”

“It’s a genetic proclivity.”

“I know, just. I like you too much for you to be hurt.”

“Or what,” Kylo said, caught between mockery and dead-seriousness, “you’ll take bloody vengeance?”

Armitage pushed back Kylo’s unruly hair and ran a hand down his cheek, brushing that funny nose with his thumb and vowing it would be the last time.

“Take care of yourself, Ben.”

.

Armitage waited at the rendezvous point in a nearby market, watching ordinary people do their business. At the stall beside him a little girl cooed at a creature in a cage. It was an odd-looking feline creature curled around a chewed-up toy bird, grooming fur that— strangely enough— was the same color as Armitage’s hair.

Even stranger, it opened its eyes and stared right at him.

“Caleb.”

Armitage turned around to see Phasma swagger up, still holding a half-full flask.

Once they had moved away together to a secure location, he spoke without preamble. “How far do I need to promote you for you to forget that display?”

“Grand Marshal should do quite nicely.”

He snorted and shook his head. “I got caught up in the role, but now...find out why the Chiss decided to install a hyperdrive inside a _ planet.” _

“Of course.” Phasma consulted her comlink. “It appears we should wait a few moments more before departing. Your security will be even better assured if we do.”

“I defer to your judgment.”

They waited until Kylo stormed up to them, blue and grey plainclothes traded for his mask and armor.

“What are you doing here?” Armitage snapped, as if he had no idea Kylo was even on the planet.

“Force business. I required a new kyber crystal, and the workshop here has a remarkable variety to choose from.”

“Might I see your selection?”

Kylo reached into his cloak and fished out a shard of crystal, corrupted and gleaming red and—

“That’s broken,” Armitage exclaimed. A sharp crack ran down the center, nearly splitting it in two.

“It’s mine.”

“Why’d you pick it—“

“It’s mine,” Kylo growled.

Armitage sniffed and turned away. “I suppose I never will understand matters of the Force.”

The crystal imprinted itself, glimmering on Armitage’s irises long after Kylo stashed it again.

“Was your trip productive?”

Armitage replied brusquely, more than he meant to. “I have a lead now. You would know, if you kept up with your comlink.”

“You think it’s the Chiss.”

Armitage nodded.

“...Anything else of interest?”

“Not to you.”

“To you, then?”

“In a kinder world, perhaps.”

“He broke a stranger’s heart,” Phasma crowed.

Armitage retorted quickly: “He’ll recover.” 

“Not for a while! You sucked off his face like a starving Rathtar and then dropped him. Last I saw, he was crying into his drink.”

Neither Armitage nor Kylo commented on this. 

Instead they walked in silence for several more minutes until Kylo stopped abruptly, hand on his saber. Phasma and Armitage immediately reached for their blasters, as did the squad tailing them a few feet away.

“There’s a tremor in the Force,” he muttered. “I haven’t felt anything like it since—"

“_Mrow__.”_

They spun around, saber and blasters all pointed at a small ginger-haired animal. It had slunk up to sit just behind them and now licked its paws, seemingly oblivious to the threat of imminent death.

“That...animal was in a cage earlier, at the marketplace,” Armitage remarked. “Who let it out?”

“No one,” Kylo said abruptly.

“How do you know?”

“Because I do. Its mind is surprisingly clear on the point.”

“Are you—” Phasma knit up her brow. “Are you reading the cat’s mind?”

“The _ Loth_-cat’s mind,” he corrected, now approaching the cat with uncharacteristic timidity. “And yes.”

Armitage scowled at the back of his helmet. “What the hell is a Loth-cat?”

“A cat from the planet Lothal, near the ancient Jedi temple,” Kylo explained, and even the mask couldn’t obscure his reverence. “In the stories, they bonded with the finest Force-sensitives and strengthened them further, but _ this _ one? This one is special even among all its peers.”

“It’s a _ cat__,”_ Armitage repeated. No one seemed to hear him.

Kylo crouched down, and the creature left its paws to instead serve him with a calm stare. With his gloved hand Kylo reached out to stroke it between its ears, quietly, _ tentatively_. But the second the glove met its fur, it let out a yowl, sprang forward, and raked its claws across his mask.

“_What_,” Armitage muttered, “does Oga put in those cocktails?”

A hallucinogen, if he had to guess.

Kylo staggered back, cursing loud in a mix of languages. He slurred the words, and Armitage wondered exactly how many refills he had ordered.

“I don’t think it likes you,” Phasma observed.

“No,” he barked, “no, it likes me, it’s just convinced that I’ve _ insulted it _ somehow. It prefers—”

The cat breezed past Kylo with haughty grace, holding its squashed face and its tail high in the air, and began circling Armitage’s feet instead.

Phasma cackled, while Kylo squawked in protest.

Armitage let out a laugh in disbelief. “Oh no, _ I’m _ not adopting it.”

“I don’t think you have a choice,” he huffed. “It’s adopted you.”

“I don’t even know what it is!”

“It’s a Loth-cat. Five years old and female,” Kylo spat, “but neither of those things is exactly right. It’s very ambiguous.”

Armitage had opened his mouth to complain but then snapped it shut. Instead he regarded the Loth-cat prowling about his feet. It paused to look back up at him with gray-green eyes.

“And,” Kylo grumbled, running his fingers over the front of his helmet, “it’s completely dented my mask.”

“I have to give it credit for taste,” Armitage breathed.

“You’re a general.” Phasma crossed her arms and chuckled. “You can keep a cat if you want.”

“What’ll it eat?” he protested.

Kylo answered, “Rats.”

“There are no rats on my ship!”

“Loth-cat chow,” she interjected. “They sell it here, I’ll send out a trooper to requisition some.”

“But what—” Armitage floundered, stunned for what felt like the fiftieth time that night. “What do I call it?”

“Something appropriate for its stature,” Kylo said. “Something vicious and violent and—”

“Millicent.”

“It’s a warrior cat out of legend, you can’t name it ‘_Millicent’—” _

The cat rubbed its cheek against Armitage’s shin and let out a satisfied purr.

“Apparently I can.”

“That’s settled then,” Phasma said. “Come on, back to the ship.”

Armitage scooped up Millicent. She came into his arms willingly, a humming weight against his chest, and he kept walking through Batuu’s warm night air. With Kylo on one side and Phasma on the other, he let his guard down and simply took in as much of the planet as he could— the rough natural rock formations, the fellow travelers scurrying around them on the road, the sounds of life wafting from the outpost behind them. It all embraced him, a warm whole blanket around his shoulders.

He had thought of saving the galaxy for years— Brendol’s dream given new form— but it had always been a vague notion, unsubstantial and somehow unreal. Saving the galaxy had been a tautologically good goal, a sound theoretical foundation to work from, but it had been only that.

He shuffled his feet, dragging them over the footprints and natural grooves of Batuu’s rocky ground. He held Millicent closer and let her ground him.

The whole surreality of the night fell away— the twisted humor, the veiled ambiguities. The way he and Kylo had circled the truth and never quite converged.

At long last, they might have pushed the bond between them too far, wearing it down, fraying it fiber by fiber until it was no more. Kylo no longer stole glances at him as they walked side by side, and when he spoke he seemed more disturbed by Millicent’s rejection than Armitage’s. For his part, Armitage doubted he’d ever recover from Kylo, but he’d try to muddle through and make do with his new cat. While it wasn’t quite integration, he had somehow rediscovered balance on Batuu’s rock. 

A little boy shrieked with laughter and scrambled past the three of them, tugging a balloon on a string while his father followed a few feet behind, and the world shifted slightly under Armitage’s feet. A few breaths of Republic-held air had addled his brain. It was sewn into his every nerve now, that this galaxy and this freedom was worth fighting for.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next up: Hux acts like a sensible balanced person and definitely does not build a superweapon.


	10. Chapter 10

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This chapter: the halting problem.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I cannot take most of the <strike>blame</strike> credit for the pseudoscience to come. Starkiller's use of quintessence, phantom energy, portals, etc. is established in canon sources like the TFA novelization.
> 
> In the process of researching this chapter I ran into the following phrase in a theoretical physics paper: "unsuppressed couplings of the quintessence field with dark matter degrees of freedom." Hux is a quintessence field, Kylo is "dark matter degrees of freedom," and their couplings ought to be unsuppressed; pass it on!

**Part IV**

Once Armitage completed his speech, he fell silent and met Snoke’s gaze across the hologram, awaiting the verdict.

“So you intend to harness this...quintessence dark energy.”

“Precisely. Quintessence is a fabric woven throughout the whole galaxy, and in theory I should be able to tear a bit off for our purposes.”

“Even though all normal observations suggest that this fabric doesn’t even exist.”

“Normal observations,” Armitage replied with more than a little ice, “would suggest that the Force doesn’t exist.”

With a tip of the head, Snoke acknowledged the point.

“Imperial researchers,” Armitage continued, “found compelling evidence of quintessence, but it refused to interact with ordinary matter. It was there, discoverable but impossible to use.”

“Until it found someone sufficiently sensitive to its nature.”

Armitage nodded. “In theory I should be able to pull it into a more ambiguous state. It won’t act exactly like gravity or electromagnetism or any force you’re familiar with, but the properties should mimic what goes on inside a hyperdrive.”

“Where do the suns come into it?”

“I— I don’t believe I mentioned the suns yet.”

“Do you imagine I would have promoted you so quickly, if I didn’t know it was your destiny to burn worlds and kill suns?”

It took Armitage a moment to recover.

“The suns— the stars will provide the ammunition for the weapon. Stars are filled with plasma; the mechanics aren’t so different from firing a plasma bolt from a blaster.”

“In theory,” Snoke repeated.

“It’s all theory,” he said with an arch of the eyebrow, “until I get the space to put into practice.”

Snoke snorted, a soft sound of amusement that chilled Armitage’s spine.

“You can have your space,” he said, “my little starkiller.”

.

Starkiller Base was a superweapon, an unholy terror unmatched since the days of the Sith Empire and their kyber crystals. It was Armitage’s design. A hybrid of three exceptional parts.

First: the foundations. Where the Death Star had been crafted from scratch, Starkiller Base would be built on a stable, well-balanced planet. Armitage had openly plagiarized the idea from the Chiss and their mobile planet, a technological project that they had been planning for decades— Armitage’s research post-Batuu showed that they had once sought the Empire’s help in drafting the plans, and that Palpatine himself had lavished his attention on it. The Chiss meant only to make a planet-sized garrison, a gigantic fortress they could move about the confines of their territory to keep the peace and deter internal threats. They would use their mobile planet for strictly defensive purposes. Armitage’s intentions were not so innocent.

Second: the starstuff. Put simply, Starkiller was a planet-sized blaster that ran on suns. It would drain stars of their matter, sucking up their hot ionized plasma, and then unleash it in deadly rays at its targets. Copying off the old Imperial-Chiss plans, Armitage fitted the base with a massive hyperdrive so it could use up a star and then move to a new one. The hyperdrive was a necessary component to justify the investment, to convince the Order that the base would stay useful in perpetuity. It was a component they would never get to use.

Third: the stealth. Armitage’s own contribution.

In a past era the Death Stars had to announce their every move, coming within close range of their victims and thus exposing themselves to attack. By contrast Starkiller would kill from a galaxy away. Its weapon would work on the same principles as hyperspace travel, shooting plasma through wormholes in a hidden dimension. Thus its rays had to open portals and rip straight through space, disappearing via molecular displacement and reappearing just in front of its targets, yet no hyperdrive could handle pure stellar matter. Instead, Armitage had discovered a theoretical basis for launching the plasma bolts with quintessence, converted into an ambiguous, liminal state he called “phantom energy.”

With phantom energy, he could eliminate as many as ten planets at once, all in different sectors of the galaxy.

He could wipe out all the hopes of the Order in a single, fiery instant.

.

“So,” Kylo deadpanned when he learned of this plan, “you’re going to chew suns and spit them back up.”

“Treat it with some respect. It’s a superweapon, not a tantruming toddler.” Armitage then granted Kylo’s mask a withering look. It was the only sort they exchanged anymore, now that their relationship had settled into pure workplace rivalry with scarcely a hint of sex. “Though I suppose  _ you _ prove the two are not mutually exclusive.”

With a scoff Kylo stormed away, the tortured strings of his cowl fluttering loose behind him. Armitage sniffed and returned to his comlink.

.

One sure way of ending an electrical fire was to starve it of air.

.

At night, Armitage couldn’t sleep without Millicent on top of him, sprawled across his chest like a furry armored breastplate. He remembered dreaming of phantom fingers on his skin, of hands that anchored him in sleep even as Dassal Prime’s ground quaked beneath him. Now he hypothesized that those hands had been Ben Solo’s, one sad soul reaching out to another across a bond neither had yet recognized. No such ghosts haunted him anymore.

He woke up with grooves carved into the meat of his hands by his own fingernails. It was a bad habit he had picked up along the way, the way his fists closed too tight as if he was about to loop back in time, as if they had been zapped shut around a live wire. As if at every moment he was subliminally set on escape.

.

Several truths were crystal-clear: he had to stay in his place and be the best he could be. He had to drink with his enemies, and lightly antagonize his once-soulmate, and pick his own corpse off the battlefield. He had to save the galaxy, and that meant deveining the First Order with a single slice. 

Snoke supported Starkiller Base with frankly frightening glee. 

While Kylo stayed behind with the bulk of the Order, Armitage returned to Dassal— now a set of uninhabited ghost planets, relieved of their cores by Brendol’s old mining operations. They still revolved around their red giant of a sun, all reduced to a series of hollowed-out shells. Armitage ran through them all, testing the initial iterations of his design. He filled each with plasma and shot it back out, aiming at uninhabited planets in neighboring systems. The first cycle of tests failed, spectacularly shattering Dassal Prime and its acid lakes into a cloud of dust. Snoke expressed his displeasure.

“I expected better of you,” he said, his blue hologram crackling. “I had foreseen it, that you were capable of more.”

Armitage updated his theories.

.

Once again busy with physics in the Unknown Regions, he fell out of the loop. He was the last in High Command to learn that Luke Skywalker had recently sent a message to a Resistance agent.

Luke Skywalker was definitively alive.

It had been a point of ambiguity before. Skywalker had been at once both alive and dead— crushed under the roof Kylo had dropped on him that fateful night his school burned. Armitage had known the crush of Kylo’s guilt as heavy as the rooftop, felt it embroidered all through his head. But Skywalker had gotten free.

Kylo might too.

Armitage tried to calculate the effect that revelation would have had on Kylo. It was liable to upturn his worldview, to cut right through an unresolvable knot at his core. For Kylo, it presented a second chance.

Armitage looked back at the disastrous results of his early experiments. He too could use a few more chances.

(Armitage loops)

He landed only a few hours earlier, in his lab on Dassal 6’s moon, with a faint pleasure in his head that might or might not have been his own.

There was no fixing his very first experiments, and thus Dassal Prime was consigned to ash and dust. But the discovery about Skywalker had instantly scrambled Kylo’s mind and set up a new wall for Armitage; whenever he looped in his future, he would land at this point in time or later. It was convenient— he could iterate on his Starkiller experiments without going through the initial set-up ever again. He had locked in the events that led to the start of Starkiller, absurd cantina conversations and all.

Snoke had foreseen Starkiller’s progress. He was certain it would be unnaturally swift. Now Armitage only had to loop until he made that prophecy come true.

.

“What targets shall we consider for Starkiller?” he asked, just to be certain.

Snoke hummed. “The optimal answer to that question is still uncertain. Shrouded in darkness.”

Armitage smiled.

.

He picked through all the data he could gather on the Order’s operations and curated a list of ideal targets. Snoke conducted most of his business from his dreadnought, but he did occasionally deign to visit a planet’s surface. Armitage would get him then if possible. Beyond that he’d have a go at the most productive factories and mines, and at the Imperial Academy now reopened on Lothal, and a few key datacenters in the Unknown Regions. The last target would be Starkiller itself. If Armitage’s failed experiments taught him anything, it was that a million things could go wrong with a superweapon of this size. He left himself a few easy openings, building them into the design. 

.

Millicent slunk around his lab, carefully weaving between his vials and devices and purring when he made a breakthrough, as if she understood. With the exception of her he was alone again, locked in his solitary hermitage. He was alone and unique in all the galaxy.

He was fully himself again. In his isolation, he converged once more on certain absolute truths. This plus that always equals this. One divided by infinity forever approaches zero, but never reaches it. He was one man staring down infinity. It hadn’t reduced him to dust just yet.

Even after days full of setbacks wore him thin, he thought of the little boy on Batuu and the balloon that bobbed around his wrist. It was an absolute truth, that one ought to protect that boy and the trillions of innocents like him across the galaxy. Armitage would rise to the task. It was his will, now fired with the full force of his intellect and his passion, and he would rely on all three for strength.

As Armitage set his stare on the whole galaxy, he turned his thoughts inwards.

.

The next failed experiment snapped Snoke’s patience. Armitage gathered up all the main Starkiller results. Committed them to memory.

(Armitage loops)

The official location of Starkiller Base was the planet that had supplied the Death Star with the kyber crystals for its grand laser. It had been mined further for the First Order’s other weapons, stripped entirely of kyber, but the rest of its rock stood solid…

Until the hyperdrive installation went slightly wrong, and half the planet caved in on itself long before Armitage wanted it to. It was proof of the concept that he could destroy the base quickly. It was also presently inconvenient.

(Armitage loops)

Armitage slightly miscalculated how quintessence would behave once converted to phantom energy. The error blew up his lab.

(Armitage loops)

Armitage fitted Starkiller Base with the galaxy’s most powerful thermal oscillator— powerful, though at risk of exploding if its cycles were disrupted. He added in a gigantic Class 3 hyperdrive— lightning-fast, if prone to motivator issues. He defended it with a planetary shield— near-unbreakable, although slow to start up. He built in vulnerabilities disguised as strengths.

He built in an incomprehensible encryption system that no one would understand, that would keep Starkiller’s workings a mystery even to its own troopers. It would keep any and all spies from learning their business.

It would keep any and all troopers from noticing when Armitage edited the target coordinates.

The Dassal experiments sped forth. From Dassal 2, he dispatched a ray of stellar plasma into the darkness. It turned invisible and crept up on its target, wholly unseen. It proceeded to miss said target by several parsecs, instead materializing in Chiss territory and starting an extra war.

(Armitage loops)

Starkiller rose. Armitage conducted his Dassal experiments as efficiently as he could, progressing with what would seem to any trained observer to be superhuman speed. Then he moved to Starkiller, converging on it just as Kylo did, and oversaw the final preparations.

Snoke offered nothing but praise. “Your star rises, young Hux. You grow into your power, just as I predicted.”

While Kylo brooded in the background, placed there on Snoke’s orders, Armitage completed his final experiments. Excepting Dassal Prime, every other planet in the Dassal system was still intact. 

Then Starkiller fired, and the hell of Armitage’s childhood was no more.

“Your first target,” Snoke declared before Dassal’s dust had cleared, “is the Chandrila system.”

“But—”

“I have learned of Resistance activity there, rooted even more deeply than we previously thought. Execute them at once.”

(Armitage loops)

Armitage stretched himself further. He assembled Starkiller with mechanical, now algorithmic precision. He put forth discoveries that had taken him years to achieve as instantaneous flashes of insight. For the first time in a long while, tedium began to fray his nerves, but he pushed through.

Before Snoke could intervene, Armitage offered up another system in Chandrila’s place: Hosnia. A strategic enough target as the current capital of the Republic, and far less likely to send Kylo into an emotional tailspin. Armitage had to avoid those now.

He gave what passed for an inspirational speech in the Order and fired five beams on Hosnia.

While his troopers lost themselves in celebration, he excused himself to the refresher.

(Armitage loops)

Armitage had a single shot at changing the target coordinates and bringing down the Order. He didn’t dare attempt it during a test, not when a team of archivist droids would be monitoring all the proceedings in addition to his troopers, so the optimal moment for sabotage was the first real firing. In the back of his mind he worried constantly about being discovered.

There was power in uncertainty, in ambiguity. It’d help keep Snoke and his predictions from pinning his destiny down. In the last days, Armitage flipped a coin and let it make his choice for him. Don't execute the plan this loop, it said.

Hosnia burned, and Coruscant too. He chose to target two systems just to check it was possible, that he could send his rays in completely different directions. He gave the order to fire with clinical detachment and undid it all in seconds.

(Armitage loops)

Not this loop, said the coin. Armitage made another incremental improvement, priming Starkiller’s hyperdrive to explode if activated. It allowed him to collapse the whole planet the second he was finished with it, though he kept the oscillator accessible just as a failsafe.

(Armitage loops)

Not this loop, said the coin. 

Armitage turned his attention to Kylo. His original plan had been to drag Kylo onto a ship and launch him far away seconds before collapsing the base, but there was risk there. He’d prefer to have Kylo off the base in the first place. Thus he searched for a compelling mission, something to lure Kylo out of the Unknown Regions and keep him far from Starkiller when it burned.

A flimsy lead arose on the hunt for Skywalker. Armitage used it as an excuse to fly them both out to Jakku. It triggered a series of minor inconveniences— one stormtrooper turning traitor and stealing a ship with a droid and some local girl. It was a tangled mess, unlikely to bring real results anytime soon. A perfect wild goose chase to distract Kylo and keep him safe in Republic territory.

Still, the mere thought of coming close to Skywalker might upend Kylo’s psyche. Armitage returned to Starkiller, where Snoke rumbled about a new Jedi uprising, and felt compelled to check.

(Armitage loops)

As he had hoped, he landed far away on the moon of Dassal 6, at the instant when Kylo learned that Luke was still alive.

Armitage twisted himself into the old mold. He kept everything in its proper place. He repeated his experiments exactly. This plus that always equals this, and he arrived right on time with Kylo on Jakku.

Not this loop, said the coin.

So he committed to completing this experiment. He gave his tidy little speech— all the Order’s cliches strung together for the perfect propaganda clip. In truth he was simply plagiarizing old Imperial rhetoric. It was easy to channel the old Emperor for a new age.

He watched Starkiller fire at Hosnia and kept a look of rapt awe pasted on his face, as if the pomp and power didn’t bore him half to tears.

He checked in on the Skywalker mission. Kylo had just reported in from Takodana, far from both Starkiller and Hosnia.

Kylo Ren was perfectly safe.

Armitage hummed in satisfaction and stepped into a nearby supply closet. He calmly flicked off the lights.

(Armitage loops)

Too early, Armitage crashed into a wall.

He expected to land in his lab back in the Dassal system. He expected to land alone, with space and time to recover from the disorientation of time travel.

He blinked, rapidly glancing around his surroundings. He was encircled by people. He was on Starkiller. In one of the conference rooms just off the bridge, in front of a datapad that he presumably had been consulting. It was switched off. He started booting it back up, wondering what file he had been looking at. He had to find it again, to dive into his excessively thorough records and identify when he’d appeared,  _ why _ he’d appeared—

“Congratulations, General.”

Captain Phasma’s voice shocked him back to awareness. She wasn’t one for empty praise.

“Oh?” he asked, keeping his voice neutral.

“You outshone your father today.”

And  _ that _ was a compliment he’d never received from her. There wasn’t much he had ever done to earn that, she wasn’t nearly technical enough to appreciate Starkiller’s rapid progress and the impossible success of the early experiments. There was nothing in his history to cause this effect, nothing but—

He ran past her out of the room without any excuse, heedless of the stares.

(Armitage loops)

“Congratulations, General.”

He kept silent, praying to a divinity he didn’t believe in.

“This will be our mark on history,” Phasma continued with prophetic weight. “Your mark. The galaxy will never forget how, today, Hosnia burned.”


	11. Chapter 11

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This chapter: on the bright side, bridal carrying.

The Hosnian system consisted of five planets. Multicultural centers of commerce and politics, they were densely populated with an estimated ten billion residents and as many visitors at any time. While the Hosnian worlds had a wealth of natural resources, of minerals and precious gems, they were richer in brainpower. Their scholars and artists turned out one masterpiece after the other, books and newspapers that had awed Armitage the few times he had obtained them. Their cities towered high, hard angles all glimmering with endless lights. Precious gems in their own right.

As the celebrations raged on outside, Armitage stood in the refresher. He strained to remember how to pick his own corpse off the battlefield, when there were twenty billion others he never would.

(Armitage loops)

Kylo. Takodana. Something happened to Kylo on Takodana.

“Congratulations, Gene—”

“There’s no time to sit on our laurels. Keep moving.”

Armitage dismissed the coin. He retreated immediately to his own quarters, patching into the communication lines from Kylo’s mission. The Resistance was attacking on Takodana; Armitage hadn’t known that would happen. Updates indicated that General Organa’s own ship had moved into the system to lead the attack.

Still, Kylo had brushed with her before without being turned inside out, and the Takodana records showed that he had ordered a sensible, early retreat. He should have been out of the system before his mother entered it.

There was some other phenomenon here.

“Prepare a cell for a new captive,” said the records. “Female human of estimated age 19, likely suspect in the Jakku theft—”

The girl from Jakku. Armitage hadn’t studied her, hadn’t thought of her before.

His hands clenched of their own volition.

Gritting his teeth, he unfurled them and pulled a hidden datapad from a compartment under his bed. He hacked into Starkiller’s energy grid and servers, stealing twice as much computing power as he had ever dared in the past. He blinked past the tears and smashed the buttons on his keypad. He swallowed down the blood when he bit through his tongue, frantically recomputing the paths to his own targets at the center of the Order.

Though Starkiller’s shields were up and impenetrable, though it was unlikely that Kylo would have yet another emotional revelation anytime soon, Armitage was newly terrified of running out of time.

.

He was late. He had squandered whole decades, and now he was eternally running _ late. _

He had to split his attention between the Skywalker mission— the girl, who was she, _ who was she to Kylo— _ and the updated sub-hyperspace computations. He had to use Starkiller once for his own purposes. He had to twist it and burn down the Order.

Otherwise, Hosnia burned for nothing. 

“General, your presence is requested immediately by the tracking team—”

A third cause snagged him, splitting him further, because the Resistance had worked back from the Hosnian attack vectors to find Starkiller itself. They had sent a recon ship to analyze its mechanics. It was a perfectly sensible tactical move. He expected nothing less from a general of Organa’s caliber.

Unfortunately, the Order had recently developed hyperspace tracking— not primarily Armitage’s project, but a natural offshoot of his work on hidden dimensions- and applied it to the recon ship, easily tracking it back to the rebel base...

“On the Ileenium system,” announced the head tracking engineer.

Armitage stared back at her— her proud, gleeful smile.

“You— you’ve done well,” he replied, trying not to sound utterly hollow. “I will report this to the Supreme Leader.”

He didn’t have to. There was another option— staging an accident, eliminating the whole hyperspace tracking division and all their equipment, hacking into the servers and wiping out all mention of the Ileenium system. But that would take time, time and luck, and there was no counting on either anymore.

.

Kylo returned. Armitage meant to accost him. He meant to stop him immediately, to demand answers about the girl. He considered freezing him in carbonite— a reasonable way to stave off any further flights of emotion until Starkiller had served its purpose.

He was distracted by odd activity from his datapad— the secret one that was currently mapping out trajectories for Starkiller’s rays. It should have finished finding all the routes, but a few of the subprograms had stalled, hanging, running far longer than they should have. Whether they were making slow progress or simply looping in vain without any advancement, he couldn’t tell.

With a groan he began ripping apart the code line by line until he found a possible glitch. Armed with this new knowledge and a way to prevent the error in the first place, he slapped the light switch in his room and plunged into darkness.

(Armitage loops)

The wall was even closer this time.

He landed on his feet in his quarters, alone except for the cat curled under his blankets. A glance at his chronometer and at the outputs of his mapping program proved that he had only traveled a few minutes back. He shut down the stalled processes, slapped on the patch he had thought of, and restarted it all while hoping for the best.

Then he tore out of his quarters, all while reviewing even more of the data from the Skywalker mission. He found images of a forest on Takodana, and grainy shots of an orange-and-white BB unit. A detailed record of how Kylo had abandoned the droid for the girl from Jakku, believing that he could rip the map from her mind though no ordinary human could remember that map, not in the level of detail the Order required.

He found an intelligence report from an untrustworthy source that had never made it before him, that he personally had to fish out of the Order’s data trashbins. It claimed the BB-unit had snuck the map to Skywalker onboard—

“The _Millennium Falcon?”_ he exclaimed, snapping in a most un-generallike fashion. Troopers turned to look.

Han Solo was likely back. So was Chewbacca, and the _Millennium Falcon._ Armitage knew them all intimately from Kylo Ren’s memories, and he felt his _ own _ insides turning inside out at the thought. He had missed this detail.

Hosnia burned.

He pulled up a whole range of untrustworthy sources, known for feeding information to the Order and to the Resistance and to everyone else who would pay, and transmitted a message: Starkiller’s next target would be the Ileenium system. A lie of course, but he wouldn’t be able to cripple the Order entirely on such short notice. The survivors’ next move would surely be to send a fleet of Destroyers to the Ileenium system, to snuff out the Resistance base. The Resistance deserved a chance to escape.

“You can’t enter,” a petty officer protested. “Lord Ren is in a private audience with the Supreme Leader—”

Armitage pushed past her, striding into the hologram chamber where Kylo stood before the projection of Snoke.

“This scavenger,” Snoke snarled, “resisted you?”

Armitage scowled too, as he walked forth in the darkness. He too resisted Kylo’s mind probes— it was second nature, but only with all the force of a broken bond behind him.

“She is strong with the Force,” Kylo protested. “Untrained, but stronger than she knows!”

“And the droid?” Snoke demanded.

“Ren believed it was no longer valuable to us,” Armitage said, seizing the chance to slip into the conversation. He spoke to Snoke, but his eyes were on Kylo. Kylo’s limbs were intact, his armor no sloppier than usual, his face alarmed but unhurt—

His face.

Kylo had glanced at him and then rapidly twisted away, hiding his unmasked face as if Armitage didn’t already know its every contour. Though his impulse was to comment, Armitage left it for later. Later. As if he’d be alive later, as if Snoke wouldn’t discover his sabotage by the end of the day, as if he wouldn’t go up in flames with his monstrous creation.

As if he hadn’t stretched out his loops and weighted his coin, all to cling to an empty life and prolong that fiery end.

He kept up the mask and easily led Snoke to his desired conclusion: an attack on the Resistance. The Supreme Leader wanted the whole Ileenium system burned. This was the shatterpoint Armitage would pry open, replacing the Ileenium coordinates with his own.

He got his order. He had to get out again, leaving the room while Kylo resumed obsessing about the girl. Perhaps there was hope there.

Yet Armitage froze. He stole one last glance at Kylo’s face and thanked a divinity he didn’t believe in that it was inexplicably unmasked. A tortured smile on his face, he warred with the impulse to touch it and won.

This was the truth he had circled. He would never touch Kylo’s face again, never wander the forest of his soul again, and in such a world there was no other point to his existence. Without Kylo, he was useless for anything and everything short of saving the galaxy.

He ripped his gaze away and strode back out, wondering how he would trick Kylo onto a ship and send him off into the galaxy, out of Starkiller’s blast radius. Armitage had no fantasies of escape for himself. He’d be better off dead. His remains would be incinerated with his base. 

In a life without Kylo Ren, martyrdom would do.

.

He gave the order to fire. It took fifteen minutes to charge the weapon. In fifteen minutes, the sun would go dark. In fifteen minutes, the Order would be disabled, if not destroyed outright. 

He unclenched his fists and fiddled with the remote in his pocket, at last switching out the Ileenium coordinates for his own. This round of charging would drain the whole sun, so a jump to hyperspace would be inevitable soon afterwards. The jump would trigger the hyperdrive explosion he had rigged up. Starkiller was effectively already dead.

He half-expected Snoke’s hologram to flicker up behind him and squeeze those knobbly fingers around his throat, but no, he was still breathing.

Fifteen minutes.

He paused for a moment to look out from Starkiller’s bridge. Out through the window at the serene blue sky, the sparkling sun that he had at last doomed, the stars beyond that he would never have a shot at seeing.

His blood flowed slow in his veins. He let down his shields, weary overworked thoughts unwinding into a strange sort of peace.

.

“The shields have gone down.”

Armitage stared back at the trooper, uncomprehending.

“Sir? Starkiller Base’s shields have gone down. We’re still working to learn the cause.”

With difficulty he kicked his brain back to life, thoughts whirring as he tried to figure out whether this was his doing, unintended consequences from his own meddling. He concluded this was sabotage was not _ his_.

“Start bringing them back up,” he snapped, “immediately.”

It’d be slow. Perhaps too slow. He had _ made the shields too slow. _

“Sir, Resistance ships in the third quadrant.”

“Sir, what are your orders?”

The Resistance. They had arrived for their last stand, their fiery suicide, their ascension to martyrdom. It shouldn’t have been a surprise— they thought _ their _base was minutes from destruction. 

With exquisite purpose and deliberate design, Armitage had tangled himself in his own strings.

“Sir?”

He hurled himself into the nearest conference room, ordered everyone out, scrabbled at the lights, and hoped to jump back. He only needed a few more minutes to figure out who had lowered the shields. Only he, Kylo and Phasma had the authorization on this base, and either way he could step in and stop it if he had only a few more minutes—

Nothing.

He clenched his fists and his eyes and tried to hurl himself through spacetime and got nothing for his pains.

He threw himself back out of the room and into the fray. His subordinates had already begun an aerial counterattack.

“It’s not enough,” he barked. “More, I want every TIE fighter available in the air, and engage all the ground lasers.”

“Sir, isn’t that overkill? In case of a second wave—”

Fifteen minutes.

“We’ll— we’ll jump to lightspeed soon enough afterward. There won’t be a second wave.”

“Should we prepare for the jump now, sir?”

Armitage nearly said yes. They could dump the plasma and jump into hyperspace. They could set up camp a few systems away, the Resistance wouldn’t track them there, and he could restart the loop—

If not for the fact that the hyperdrive would explode, the second it was powered on. He had hidden the flaw well. It would take him hours to find it again. More to repair it.

He had to survive fifteen minutes.

“No,” he snapped. “Don’t prepare for the jump. Surely their ragtag band can’t match all the Order’s power.”

The words dripped with acid and more than a little irony.

.

Armitage reviewed all the plans of the base. The hyperdrive was buried deep inside, outside the Resistance’s reach. Their initial attacks had focused instead on the oscillator, which he had indeed left slightly vulnerable— a failsafe, a back-up method of self-destruction meant solely for his own use— but it was armored. They hadn’t brought their bombers in. Their X-wings wouldn’t penetrate the armor without help from the inside.

“The oscillator,” he barked. “Get troops down to the oscillator, stat. Search the insides—”

“Lord Ren has already begun a full search for intruders.” 

Armitage breathed a sigh of relief, even as a strange pain throbbed deep in his side.

In the distance, the oscillator’s armor exploded from the inside out.

.

“Ren. Ren. Come in.”

Alone in the conference room, Armitage hunched over his comlink. His magic had still deserted him. He wondered at the implications, whether Kylo was just wrapped up in a particularly long tantrum or whether perhaps he was—

“What?” Kylo bit out. Armitage dropped his head, nearly crumpling under his gratitude. 

“There is real risk from the Resistance,” he said, struggling to keep his breathing regular. “Evacuate the planet, now.”

“No.”

“Kylo—”

Raw and ragged, he replied, “Go to hell.”

“Please, I am begging you—”

The comlink switched to static when Kylo disconnected it.

.

“Weapon at full capacity in thirty seconds.”

“Prepare to fire.”

Thirty seconds. They only had to last thirty seconds. He would win if he could simply keep his fingers twisted in the Order’s power for thirty more seconds. If he could keep the Resistance from penetrating the hole in the oscillator, if he could somehow get Kylo captured by the Resistance and send him back to his mother, if he could only maintain his illusion of control for thirty more seconds—

A Resistance X-wing set fire to the entire oscillator.

Armitage scanned all the sensor data. The fuel cells had been damaged, releasing all the quintessence. The dark energy had already dissipated and woven itself back into the galaxy. The base would never fire again.

Incidentally, the planet had started collapsing.

“Sir, shall we order the evacuation?”

He didn’t respond, staring mutely at the pattern of explosions in the distance.

“General—”

“Get me Snoke.” 

He sprinted straight to the hologram chamber.

“The fuel cells have ruptured,” he panted out, looking up at the smoke-gray projection as the whole room quaked around him. “The collapse of the planet has begun.”

The walls crumpled around him. The hologram flickered from gray to a bright, electric blue as it faltered, and he hoped to be ripped apart. He hoped to be told that this was hardly the best he could be, that Snoke had foreseen a different fate that he might still achieve. Then there was still a way out, a chink somewhere in this unbreakable wall of endless failure—

“Leave the base at once,” Snoke said instead, grim and defeated. “And come to me with Kylo Ren.”

.

Armitage was paralyzed.

The projection collapsed into black. The walls shattered around him, and he found himself rooted to the spot.

He had modeled this before, simulated the collapse of the planet from a broken oscillator. The darkness would die. Starkiller would be resurrected as a new sun. He had at most ten minutes to escape with his life. 

He was rooted to the spot, all his limbs frozen as the minutes slipped away. There was a certain charm to cutting his losses and burning up here, now. It would stop his pain. If today was anything to go by, it would stop a lot of pain for the entire bloody galaxy.

But Snoke thought Kylo might still survive. That _ Armitage _ might rescue Kylo.

So he would.

(Armitage loops)

“Come to me with Kylo Ren.”

The magic had returned. Armitage staggered back as Snoke’s projection switched off, suddenly aware of a stinging sensation across his face, as if some of the debris had hit him. He wiped his forehead and found it clean.

He stumbled back out of the darkness and ordered a med shuttle.

“Shall we rendezvous with the _ Supremacy—” _

“No. My priority is Ren.”

Snoke had fitted Kylo with a tracker. He claimed it was non-invasive, only attached to his belt. Armitage had his doubts. He patched into the signal and found that it was imprecise, disrupted by the tectonic instability of the planet.

“Sir, he could be anywhere in this area—”

“Start at the most likely point, then widen the radius and circle out.”

The planet was cracking open, jagged fissures running through once-smooth snow. Armitage searched for Kylo and found him nowhere.

Starkiller rumbled ominously, and Armitage flung himself into the ship’s tiny refresher.

(Armitage loops)

He picked up the search where he left off, moving in concentric circles, spinning more and more wildly. He couldn’t find Kylo in time.

(Armitage loops)

The search had widened enough, and Armitage spotted him before any of his troopers. Kylo lay motionless in the snow. His black armor was streaked with frost. His face had been split in two by a blood-stained burn.

“Is he alive—”

“He must be,” Armitage said, possessed by an icy calm. 

He knelt down in the snow and slipped his hands underneath Kylo, wrapping his arms around him. His fingers met blood.

With an ease discrepant with his frame, he lifted Kylo into the air, one arm under his back and one arm under his knees, and carried him through the woods onto the ship.

“We’re done here,” he said.

Kylo was taken to the ship’s medbay. Armitage sank down in a chair beside him and passed into darkness.


	12. Chapter 12

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter: a lady of lightning!

**Part V**

“Sir, are you injured?”

A trooper jerked Armitage from sleep. He looked at them blankly.

“No. No, just disproportionately exhausted from your view, no doubt.” The words tumbled out of his mouth, soft and unformed. “How’s Ren?”

“Stabilized. He will require several days of rest before he wakes up, but he should survive.”

Armitage nodded. “He must.”

.

The electric blue of hyperspace streaked across the window. Kylo lay sleeping, flesh slowly knitting back together under a thick coat of bacta. Armitage turned from them both to glance at the mirror. His red hair had fallen out of form, green eyes soft and unfocused. His cheekbones no longer protruded as they had in his childhood, but he was still thin.

Thin as a slip of paper and approximately twenty billion times more useless.

Legs suddenly buckling, he slammed back against the wall. His eyes and fists seized up of their own volition, and the air sucked itself from his lungs. His pulse thrummed too loud in his ears, too fast. His mouth filled with the tang of blood, and he was falling, falling—

_ “Mrow?” _

He dropped to his knees, straining for breath as blood trickled from where he had bitten through his tongue. In an orange flash Millicent lept from some corner of the med bay, anxiously rubbing her face against the hard black of his uniform. He clung to her for balance, a tenuous anchor to the present moment as he waited out the attack. A panic attack, the back of his brain diagnosed once the pressure unknotted itself. A perfectly non-magical, human reaction to stress.

He split in two, torn between laughter and tears. He simply stayed still instead.

.

Kylo awoke before their ship arrived, days before the med droids deemed it possible. Despite the anesthetics, his eyes gleamed bright with pain.

Armitage was still beside him.

“Hux.”

“Ren,” Armitage said. “Or should I say ‘Ben’?”

He alluded to that night in the cantina and hoped for a smile. Kylo’s eyes simply filled with tears.

“I’m Ben, absolutely,” he snarled, dripping sarcasm. “And _ you’re _ afraid of being complicit in anything like the Alderaan disaster.”

“Ren—”

“I guess neither of us was quite who we said.”

Armitage froze. “But there was something that night. You felt it, didn’t you? We could. We could try to fix this.”

“You’re too late.” Despite the drugs, Kylo’s words were sharp, as were his eyes when he shifted them away from Armitage to stare at the ceiling. “I’m not interested.”

.

“Despite Hux’s considerable failures, the Starkiller project made progress on three fronts,” Snoke reflected in a meeting with High Command, from which only Kylo was absent. “Hosnia has burned. We drew out the Resistance fleet and left it in ashes. And Kylo Ren at last eliminated one of the most persistent opponents of the old Imperial project. Han Solo is no more.”

.

“You were capable of more,” Snoke murmured in a meeting with Armitage alone.

“Supreme Leader, I—”

He was stripped of his position in High Command. With a careless flick of a bejeweled finger, Snoke twisted his arms from their sockets.

.

Unnecessary pain. Armitage’s life had been reduced to nothing but unnecessary pain, nearly as pointless as his own continued existence. His mind had been reduced to numbness, a blank flickering static that refused to come into focus.

Snoke no longer spoke of grand destinies, as if Armitage’s star had fallen wholly from his radar, and yet Armitage was still alive. The other generals got the real work, the duties of subduing all the main systems. He kept the command of his ship, but the _ Finalizer _ was reduced to a support role— to escorting the Order’s grand dreadnoughts around the galaxy. Like a child who broke all his toys, Armitage was no longer let near the core of the Order. Snoke still kept him alive, as a target on which to practice assorted methods of torture. A half-dead warning to any other officer contemplating failure.

Without the capital of Hosnia to guide them, the Order would take over all the Republic’s major systems in a matter of weeks.

Armitage glutted his brain with information. In the Order victory reports and the revised death tolls, he lost himself.

.

He watched Kylo, whose face had been split to the bone by a lightsaber. Though he still cowered behind his mask, his loyalties must have split the moment Han Solo fell.

Kylo’s heart was full of light, as far as the eye could see. Armitage remembered this. He had clung to this hope. Kylo had not been prepared for Han Solo’s death, had never been _ meant _ for patricide. And he had realized something the day Starkiller died— many things. Enough to reinvent his world and disrupt Armitage’s time travel and set up new walls time and time again.

Kylo broke the things he loved to free himself from needing them. Every time, he thought it would be a show of strength, but Han Solo’s death had surely exposed the flaws in that logic. Surely Kylo’s loyalty to the Order now hung by a thread.

Surely Snoke’s death— also the only event that could still halt the Order’s ascension— would snap that thread forever.

.

Armitage snatched rare lucid moments— in the freefall drop when Snoke swept his legs out from under him and pinned him to the floor, in the throes of Snoke’s lightning. He resisted this suffering with all his will, and it did him no good. In rare lucid moments he imagined that he could wipe out his own resistance, and gain strength from the electric pain, and steal this power for his own. Then the numbness knocked the thought out of his mind.

.

There was one hope: Snoke could die. Armitage had never known for certain how to achieve this end. Even if he had a plot, he’d no longer trust himself to carry it out. He was cursed with misfortune. The things he touched broke.

He looked to the endless good luck of the Resistance.

Like the Rebellion before them, they had a knack for statistically impossible stunts. Good luck was their lifeblood. They only got luckier the harder they were pressed. They could kill Snoke, if they had to. If they killed Snoke, Ben Solo would then run back to them before the day was out. It was a flawless logical proof.

So Armitage handed his dice over to them.

The Resistance base was on D’Qar. The moment Armitage learned of this, he leaked it back to the Resistance. He hacked Captain Pryde’s ship and remotely sent the message from there, to obfuscate its source.

“The Resistance has learned that we know their location,” Snoke announced from his throne on the _ Supremacy_, with Kylo standing small and hunched over beside him. “So our existing designs have been shattered. I want the nearest ships there at once. That means the _ Fulminatrix _ and, regrettably, the _ Finalizer, _ as well as_.._.”

Armitage had simply to tie Snoke’s _ Supremacy _ onto the end of a string.

.

Armitage had been assigned to escort the _ Fulminatrix_, a dreadnought of monstrous proportions. A “Lady of Lightning” according to its name, its overpowered engines and its cannons were the stuff of Armitage’s nightmares. He had seen them raze whole cities in seconds.

On the bright side, the _ Fulminatrix _ was led by Captain Moden Canady, one of the dullest ex-Imperials to ever burden Dassal Prime. Brendol had ranted at length behind closed doors about the good captain’s strategic incompetence and his tendency to lose his head under pressure.

“You, my son,” Brendol had said. “You are never allowed that luxury.”

As they left hyperspace near D’Qar, Armitage donned his gaberwool coat. Since Starkiller he had never stepped out of his chambers without it. He had thrown himself further into the caricature of General, exaggerating his mannerisms and expressions to cover the hollow below. He imitated human emotion in the broadest strokes. He abandoned any pretense of calm or dignity. 

As he hoped, the Resistance had made it into the air by the time he arrived. Another stroke of luck, since their ground base had no chance of survival.

He smirked. “I have my orders from Supreme Leader Snoke himself. This is where we snuff out the Resistance once and for all.”

Here was a lie. Snoke had said no such thing; his predictions had gradually grown less specific. The Resistance was not doomed by fate, to the best of Armitage’s knowledge.

“Tell Captain Canady,” he continued, “to prime his dreadnought. Incinerate their base, destroy their transports and obliterate their fleet.”

Dreadnoughts were prone to catching fire when primed, and the Resistance had the bombers to set a fire. Not good ones— they didn’t have the Order’s cash to spend— but more than enough to eliminate the _ Fulminatrix _if they played their cards right. Armitage’s whole plan hinged on it.

Then the Resistance sent up a single light fighter.

His face twisted with a grimace, but he schooled it into submission again and opened the line of communication. He hoped there was a plan here, besides begging for mercy that he wasn’t at liberty to give.

“Attention. This is Commander Poe Dameron of the Republic fleet. I have an urgent communique for General _ Hugs.” _

Armitage scowled, unable to guess the Resistance’s move until the last word—

Oh.

“Patch him through,” he said smoothly.

Of course, Dameron had slipped up to the _ Fulminatrix _ under diplomatic pretenses, but he was most likely stalling, building up power for a solo attack run. Armitage could play along. Surely he could do that without failing.

“This is General Hux of the First Order,” he said with as much pomp as he could manage, channeling Palpatine at the height of his arrogance. “The Republic is no more. Your fleet are rebel scum and war criminals. Tell your precious princess there will be no terms. There will be no surrender.”

His eyes glistened for a moment, jaw tightening too hard. He pushed the tears away. There was no time.

“Hi, I'm holding for General Hugs.”

“This is _ Hux.” _ He enunciated the surname, leaving no room for error. “You and your friends are doomed. We will wipe your filth from the galaxy!”

“...Okay, I’ll hold.”

It was Armitage’s move. He paused as long as he could before letting out another “hello?”

“Hello? Yup. I’m still here.”

How long did these X-wings take to reach full power? He used to know this.

Armitage straightened up further and glared down at the technicians by his feet. “Can you— can he hear me?”

“Hugs?”

“He can?” He donned an overwrenched grimace.

“With an ‘H,’” Dameron improvised with impressive brio. “Skinny guy. Kinda pasty.”

Armitage scoffed and turned on his foot, losing dignity he wasn’t aware he had left. “I can hear you, can you hear _ me?” _

“Look, I can’t hold forever. If you reach him tell him Leia has an urgent message for him…”

Armitage looked out at the stationary X-wing, pleading with it to move.

Another officer leaned in and murmured, “I believe he’s tooling with you, sir.”

“...About his mother.”

He had hoped for a more creative punchline.

“Open fire!” Armitage roared, a second too late.

Too late, it would be too late for the _ Finalizer _ to get in a good shot, and now Dameron’s ship was streaking through space at top speed and powering through to the _ Fulminatrix. _

“He’s going for the dreadnought,” an officer insightfully observed.

“Ha!” Armitage said, bubbling over with warped glee. “He’s insane.”

With a dancer’s grace Dameron’s X-wing cleared out the _ Fulminatrix’s _ surface cannons, while Canady sat paralyzed. One of the dreadnought’s lower officers would push in any second now. Armitage might as well add fuel to the fire.

“Captain Canady,” he hollered over hologram, doing his best to stress the good captain further. “Why aren't you blasting that puny ship?”

Five minutes late the _ Fulminatrix _ scrambled its TIE fighters. A minute later, Canady finally remembered the dreadnought’s cannons. They wasted their fire on the ground base just as a final Resistance ship swooped into the sky. Right on time the Resistance bombers swept in, and right on time Canady primed his dreadnought again, thinking he might be able to target the Resistance’s main cruiser. 

The Resistance primed their bombers, which then proceeded to crash and set fire to _ each other, _ wholly missing their target. This was the trouble with too many explosives in a contained spot. Yet the last Resistance bomber got in a direct hit before the flames swallowed it up, and the _ Fulminatrix _too. Down went the Lady of Lightning.

The Resistance jumped to lightspeed.

Armitage wore a pained look— feigned consternation over the dreadnought, tinged with real alarm over Snoke’s impending call.

“General, Supreme Leader Snoke is making contact from the ship.”

He thought he might have a minute more. He wanted to make it into a darkened room first, one where he could loop at once when this all went horribly wrong.

“Excellent,” he eked out. “I'll take it in my chambers—”

Snoke’s face unfurled before him on the bridge, rendered in electric blue.

“General Hux.”

“Ah,” he stammered, struggling for balance. “Good. Supreme Leader—”

Armitage was cut off by his own shrieking— an uncharacteristically tortured sound even for him— and a rapid slam into the ground. Snoke hurled him across the floor.

He focused on picking his own corpse off the battleground.

He pushed himself up, an elegant thread of blood dangling from his lip, hair displaced and ruined. “They can’t get away, Supreme Leader,” he said softly. “We have them tied on the end of a string.”

Snoke’s projected face flickered in the lights above him. For an instant, a dark energy flickered luminous in Armitage’s eyes.

.

Hyperspace tracking required a single signal— no more than one, to avoid ruining the whole scheme through interference— and a computer accelerated beyond all normal comprehension. To achieve this end the Order suspended its computers in delicate hyperspace fields, breaking the normal constraints of time and cramming in exponentially more processing cycles.

Few in the Order had the necessary computers. Only Snoke’s dreadnought and the late Starkiller Base had the technology officially developed to maintain the hyperspace field. Yet Armitage had assembled a tracking computer from discarded prototypes, and he had hotwired a hyperspace field with a sad shadow of Starkiller’s quintessence tech.

He knew where the Resistance had jumped, within a few feet of precision.

He told Snoke that his technology was flawed and approximate, and he shoved the target coordinates just far enough off to keep the Resistance out of a dreadnought’s range.

He hadn’t planned for Snoke to invite him onto the _ Supremacy _ to witness the Resistance’s terror, but he knew the pattern from Kylo’s memories. From his own memories of his father. Creatures like them blew hot and cold. With one hand they slammed their victims down, and with the other they reeled them in for praise. They kept them tethered that way, off-balance, as long as they still thought their prey useful.

Snoke still thought he might be useful.

“Tied on a string indeed, General Hux. Well done,” Snoke declared to Armitage in the _ Supremacy’s _ throne room, as if a few words of approval cancelled out weeks of sustained abuse. “The Resistance will soon be in our grasp.”

Armitage gave gracious thanks to the Supreme Leader, and pasted on a smug smile, and tried not to snap under the weight of the tragicomic farce. His smile turned genuine for a moment as he walked out of the throne room and past Kylo. Armitage hadn’t seen him in person since delivering him from Starkiller. He still had his limbs intact, though the mask hid the real damage.

Kylo ignored Armitage. Snoke seemingly did too, not waiting until he had left the room to sneer, “Do you know why I keep a rabid cur in such a place of power?” 

The doors closed behind him before Armitage got the answer, though he could imagine it well enough.

His own mask slipped further for a moment. “Rabid” was arguable, but growing more accurate a description with every passing moment. “Cur” meant a mongrel dog, and there Armitage had to object. Drowning in classic Hux misfortune, he was as purebred as they came. 

He let up a burble of laughter and found it still bloody from his wounds.

.

Kylo swept out of the turbolift a few minutes after he did, stalking down a hallway with his mask abandoned. Armitage first took in the scar of his burn. The upper half had been stitched into a neat red line, but the lower part was thick and black, with a strange crosshatch pattern that made it seem embroidered into place.

“I want a full TIE attack,” Kylo ordered, shaking Armitage from his reverie. “Strike the Resistance cruiser, now.”

_ “Excuse me?” _

General Organa was on that ship. Armitage meant to force a reconciliation between mother and son. It wouldn’t be easy— the likeliest route involved a kidnapping, a firefight and multiple screaming matches— but it was possible. Leia Organa could draw the light back out of her son’s heart.

Unless Kylo blew her up in the first five minutes.

Kylo swept past him, barking out commands. As the _ Supremacy _ and its escort fell out of hyperspace, Armitage fell back into the fray, moving to the bridge lest he appear as useless as he was. He couldn’t shake the feeling of unreality, like he was caught in a nightmare— in one of his Starkiller nightmares if he was pressed to specificity, where the ground had split beneath him and left him suddenly on a precipice.

He had developed quite a range of nightmares to choose from.

Purposefully spinning his ship, Kylo wove his way into the battle. He wiped out the Resistance’s X-wings with one click of a button. Then he careened away and led his fighters in a loop that led straight to the cruiser.

The transmissions from his weapons systems confirmed that the bridge was his target.

Armitage whipped away from the screen to look out at the battle, praying for Kylo not to take the shot, screaming it into the void.

Kylo didn’t take the shot.

The two fighters escorting him did.

Armitage staggered back as General Organa went up in flames, and not by Kylo’s hand. He froze.

So did Kylo. A blast hit his ship, and he went spinning not by his own volition, and Armitage thrust officers out of his way in his mad dash to the nearest dark spot—

(Armitage loops)

He landed at the instant of the blast and smashed the comlink button. He had to shock Kylo back to himself.

“Ren, the Resistance has pulled out of range,” he snapped over hologram. “We can’t cover you at this distance. Return to the fleet.”

First Kylo snapped back at him, a strange wordless snarl. Then by some grace he listened.

.

Armitage should have known better. The things he touched broke. Starkiller. Hosnia. Now Leia Organa. But Kylo was back and alive, his face more worn than ever, and Armitage saw no other viable path just yet. 

“What is the point of all this—” Armitage gestured grandly at Snoke’s dreadnought and the Destroyers set up behind it— “if we can't blow up three tiny cruisers?”

It was a rhetorical question.

“They are faster and lighter, sir,” said Captain Peavey, and Armitage marveled at how fast his star had fallen, if his subordinates thought he genuinely needed this explained. “They can't lose us but they can keep at a range where our cannons are not effective against their shields.”

This was the one path he saw: to keep the _ Supremacy _ tied on the end of the Resistance’s leash until the heroes’ next lucky stunt.

“They won't last long burning fuel like this.” Armitage stepped up to a blue projection of the Resistance cruiser, bringing his face to its bow, grasping at an inhumane calm. “It's just a matter of time.”

.

Armitage doubted himself.

Perhaps he had miscalculated. Perhaps the Resistance was out of tricks. Perhaps there was no one left who could bring Kylo back. Perhaps he had pinned down the Resistance and tethered them to their doom.

“Sir, why don’t we call in reinforcements? Another Destroyer, we might even be able to have one of ours jump away and then leap back, at closer range—”

“And waste the hyperfuel?” Armitage snapped, wheeling about and bearing down on the subordinate who dared question him. “What, my plan isn’t good enough for you? Do you doubt my authority?”

She shut up out of fear, recoiling as if from a live wire.

Insecurity. Armitage was down to feigning insecurity, to playing a perfectionist general so terrified of failure he terrorized all around him. He was down to playing his _ father, _ marching about in the same black coat and trapped in the same cycles. Now he could only defend his strategy by biting off the head of anyone who doubted it. There was no logical counterargument to her point. If he cared at all for the Order, he would have already done exactly as she suggested. 

If he was still himself at his fiery height before the fall of Starkiller, he would have had a thousand comebacks. He would have had such a detailed cover story to explain his every action that no one would have questioned him in the first place.

But he was not himself.

.

His face was pale and bloodless and wrinkled like once-melted wax. His ribs hurt as if his heart had been pulled out of place, though that might’ve just been the bruising from Snoke’s latest maltreatment. He stared at the mirror in the chambers assigned to him— not his own, he had been stashed in a new unit that was cold and sadly devoid of cats— and tried to get a grip on himself.

Perhaps he had already made a mistake.

“Perhaps.” That was all he had, probabilities and ambiguities. Not an absolute truth in sight.

Perhaps the Resistance wouldn’t give up without trying another hyperspace jump. Perhaps he could build in that one failsafe. If he broke the _ Supremacy_’s tracking computer, if he could perhaps make it send out multiple contradictory signals, then he could still save the day. The remnants of the Resistance would survive, such as they were. Broken and useless as they were without their general.

He tried hacking the _ Supremacy’s _supercomputer, encircled by layers of security in both the digital and real worlds. For hours he worked without making a single dent. Useless.

(Armitage loops)

The supercomputer had resisted all his tampering. He turned his attention instead to the static hyperspace field around it. Those calculations still came halfway naturally to him, and he flung himself into his studies.

It took him an hour to notice that he hadn’t landed on the bridge this time, at the moment of General Organa’s death. Instead he had landed a few hours later in his cell of a suite.

(Armitage loops)

Armitage hacked into the _ Supremacy’s _ surveillance systems. For someone who liked to pretend omniscience, Snoke used a surprising amount of cameras and microphones, focused heavily on private quarters.

Focused heavily on Kylo.

Armitage rewound their video to the instant when his loop began, the strange moment that must’ve turned Kylo inside out once more. He expected torture or abduction or at least the violent disembowlment of a control panel.

Instead Kylo sat quietly, waiting as a med droid stitched up the rest of his scar. He waved it away. Then he flinched, and leapt to his feet and slid— _ slid— _ out into a hallway. It was a perfectly ordinary hallway, but he looked about it as if seeing it for the first time before reaching out to empty air and declaring, “You will bring Luke Skywalker to me.”

Probabilities. Armitage updated his beliefs. One was that Kylo was mid-psychotic break, but he set it aside. Perhaps Kylo was speaking to a ghost— he had claimed that Vader’s phantom had approached him once. Perhaps he was communing with his mother. He pulled back his arm with a chastened look that reinforced that last theory, yet Armitage couldn’t quite believe that he’d open a conversation with his late mother by demanding his uncle’s head.

“You’re not doing this, the effort would kill you,” Kylo murmured. He looked about again before turning back to the phantom, eyes fixed clearly on someone who wasn’t there. “Can you see my surroundings? I can’t see yours. Just you.”

“Just you.” He said it earnestly, tenderly, with an innocence most of the galaxy would say Kylo Ren was incapable of. Armitage knew better. He had known that innocence. Kylo had once shown it to him willingly.

“So no,” Kylo breathed, one half of a conversation Armitage was locked out of. And there was that same innocence, in the quirk of his eyebrow and the old soul’s sorrow in his eyes. Kylo would not bare that easily. He would not willingly surrender all of himself in a second to anyone else Armitage knew— to Snoke, to Luke, to Leia. As a rule, Kylo had learned to guard himself jealously. Armitage had known only one exception in all his lives. Only one phenomenon that had stripped Kylo of all his shields and made him freely, gladly honest.

“This is something else,” Kylo said, and Armitage switched off the screen and pressed his fist to the bruises over his heart, desperate for the contact though it only made them hurt harder.

.

Armitage kept the connection up. Followed Kylo with one camera and then another around the _ Supremacy _ until his eyes were raw as his heart. He identified the next odd moment when Kylo glitched and then came into focus, eyes fixed on a phantom.

“Why is the Force connecting us?” Kylo asked the next time. “You and I.”

“Did he tell you what happened?” he added moments later. “The night I destroyed his temple, did he tell you why?”

That must have been Luke Skywalker’s temple. Whoever Kylo was talking to, they had access to Luke, which eliminated most of the galaxy from contention.

“You do?” he said, a disjoint phrase that only bewildered Armitage further. “Ah, you do. You have that look in your eyes from the forest, when you called me a monster.”

The forest. 

Armitage had known the forest of Kylo’s soul. He had found Kylo in the snowy forest on Starkiller, but he hadn’t called him a monster then or ever. But on Starkiller Kylo had also tangled with the girl from Jakku. There had been forests enough on Takodana, where he had found her and been undone. It had been Hosnia’s undoing. 

Probabilities. The scavenger was the likeliest possibility, but nothing was certain. Armitage tried to remember that. It was a comforting self-delusion, a way to pretend that no, Kylo hadn’t become a strange girl’s soulmate—

“Yes,” Kylo said at precisely that moment, “I am.”

.

Hope.

Armitage really believed in it now. He could see it. The girl from Jakku had snagged Kylo’s interest and slashed his face in half without the slightest training, as if she knew all his shatterpoints the second she met him.

Armitage had known all Kylo’s shatterpoints the second he met him.

This is something else, Kylo observed, and Armitage scoffed. Indeed, soulmates were “something else.” It was one way to put it.

And though Armitage had been sawed off, his end of the bond cauterized at the source, Kylo had noted a different feeling. A sense of being left to dangle. No instant of trauma, just a growing gnawing loneliness, as if he still had the potential, the _ need _to bond to someone new.

Hope. Armitage had it now, hope that Kylo would really fumble his way back to the light. Rey would turn him, with Luke Skywalker at her side. Armitage carried this hope close to him, like a blade already slipped between his own ribs.

.

Armitage faded. He slept in snatches. He tinkered with the static hyperspace field and doubted his sabotage would matter at all— that he had ever meant anything to the strings of fate. The scavenger girl had Luke Skywalker. She had Kylo Ren. She had ascended to divinity, to invulnerability. Whatever side she chose would win by definition. Armitage couldn’t imagine a world where she bowed to anyone.

“Yeah,” Kylo said suddenly, alone in a training room and only half-dressed. “Me too.”

He turned from the camera and stepped towards her, until Armitage could barely make out his bared back. He tried to reconstruct the conversation from Kylo’s fragments, something about Han Solo and Luke and the girl’s own— apparently dreadful— parents. They were unfocused, vague phrases, and suffused with a kindness absurdly out of place in a conversation between two sworn enemies.

Kylo stepped closer to her, drifting slowly away from Armitage, and spoke again. “Let the past die. Kill it if you have to. That's the only way to become what you were meant to be.”

.

Armitage drifted down to Phasma. She still obsessed over the stormtrooper who had turned traitor, and now that the whole Resistance was within their grasp her hate had flared fresh.

“He is a bug,” she told Armitage, not for the first time. “He is a glitch in the system. He is not to be worked around, he is not to be exploited. The only proper response is simple elimination.”

(Armitage loops)

He ran into a new wall. It had ceased to surprise him. He rewound and found another scrap of conversation.

“You’re not alone,” Kylo had told the empty air seconds before.

Armitage had his best view yet from his current camera angle. He interpreted every twitch, every subtle flick of Kylo’s eyes. It was so easy for him.

Kylo pulled off his glove and reached forth bare-handed. The girl appeared in front of him, meeting his hand with her own.

It was impossible. Her body couldn’t be in two places at once. A quick switch of the sensors to thermal scanning showed that she wasn’t really there, not as a physical mass. Yet her soul was there in phantom form, reaching out and holding sway over Kylo—

Kylo’s head whipped to the side as if he knew he’d been caught. He didn’t look straight at the camera, yet Armitage punched the switch of his datapad. Its screen dropped into darkness. He couldn’t turn it back on.

He had never liked unnecessary pain.


	13. Chapter 13

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This chapter: a lady of lightning! And melodramatic Anidala parallels.

Armitage floated in and out of sleep. His comlink roused him by announcing the approach of the Millennium Falcon.

.

Rey. That was her name. Armitage found it in the ship logs when she  _ surrendered herself  _ to the  _ Supremacy,  _ likely intending to bring Snoke down and turn Kylo’s coat in the same stroke. While Armitage had lost some of his certainty from earlier, it could just work.

He patched into the surveillance in Snoke’s throne room. It was bare, only sound and a few shots of the edges of the room for catching intruders, but he clung to it all desperately.

“Well done, my good and faithful apprentice,” declared Snoke, once Kylo had delivered Rey to him. “My faith in you is restored.”

At that moment Phasma contacted Armitage, complaining that the Resistance had tried to tamper with the hyperspace tracking system. Armitage wondered whether that really was the Resistance, or simply a side effect of his own lifeless floundering. As he deliberated on his response, Snoke continued. It was his usual slithering mix of intimidation and backhanded praise.

An alert. Phasma sent footage of the alleged Resistance break-in. Some man had overloaded the door of the breaker room with a crescent of Haysian smelt, a near-perfect conductor, and got caught on camera doing it. He was trying to knock the tracking computer offline for a cycle by breaking its power circuit. Armitage should have thought of that. 

He ignored that and devoted his focus to Kylo.

“Darkness rises,” Snoke said, “and light to meet it.”

If Rey was light in his calculations, Snoke offered a partial truth at best. Kylo’s heart was shot through with light, seeping out the cracks until its armor could barely contain it. If Snoke was right, there had to be deeper darknesses in this galaxy than either Rey or Kylo. Forces equal and opposite.

“Have you seen something, a weakness in my apprentice?” Snoke hissed from his throne. “Is that why you came? Young fool.”

Though meant for Rey, the words stung. Armitage had been a young fool, waiting at the base of that black shuttle for his knight to come. A half-wit of galactic proportions—

“It was  _ I _ who bridged your minds.”

Armitage dropped his datapad. It clattered to the floor. 

Snoke had to die.

He kept on blathering, claiming that  _ he _ was responsible for “stoking Ren’s conflicted soul,” as if Armitage was irrelevant. He claimed that Kylo was merely bait for Rey, that he had  _ made _ Armitage irrelevant. Downright redundant, next to her. Snoke had noticed the loose thread dangling from Kylo’s soul and used it merely as a leash to rope in another pawn. 

Armitage’s legs buckled, dropping him like dead weight against the wall, and his thoughts collapsed into chaos, into another ill-timed panic attack. In the distance Rey screamed.

Plasma met plasma. Blade on blade. There was no place for Armitage there.

His fingers tried for the datapad and missed repeatedly. When he grabbed it again he couldn’t make sense of the scene. All he saw was the red of a guard falling into a pit, their mag-coil armor shredded and spit back out again with a flash of blue lightning. There shouldn’t have been exposed power couplets in Snoke’s room. There was no reason for open blue sparks, unless someone had broken protocol somewhere along the way—

Armitage slammed the datapad down again and cracked the screen. His synapses were misfiring, fixating on meaningless protocol in a moment of crisis. His brain’s poor wiring matched the poor wiring outside. Nothing else seemed real.

.

The next time his mind deigned to concentrate, Armitage noticed that half the throne room was in flames.

“The fleet,” Rey exclaimed. “Order them to stop firing. There’s still time to save the fleet.”

Exhausted, Armitage checked his comlink again. It took nearly all his will to loosen it from his belt. When he saw it, he found Phasma had opened fire on thirty Resistance escape pods.

Armitage still had time to save the fleet, if he could only string together a coherent sentence.

But he couldn’t. He didn’t.

He heard Kylo speaking again, his words oddly stilted, and over the crackle of the flames and the clanging in his ears Armitage couldn’t make sense of them. Rey and Kylo were speaking. He was asking her to rule the galaxy with him, oscillating between eerie seduction and needless cruelty, and Armitage couldn’t make sense of a bloody thing. He peeled his body off the wall and shoved it into the turbolift, punching the button for the throne room.

The doors opened. An explosion blinded him.

Once it subsided, he found the room full of firelight. The walls— once the color of fresh blood— had been torn down and blackened by the struggle. Snoke had been split through, his torso and head literally lolling on the ground while his lower half and bejeweled hands still warmed the throne. All around golden sparks sprayed into the air, a literal manifestation of hope reborn.

Yet as Armitage floated forward, the whole world slowed into a sinister unreality. It took him an oddly long time to notice that Kylo was unconscious. It took even longer to process the fact that Rey was standing over Kylo, with tears streaked down her cheeks and his red saber ignited in her hand. 

She whirled around and pointed the blade straight at Armitage’s chest.

“You want them— us to stop firing,” he said, even as some force dragged the words back down into his throat. “Don’t you?”

“I don’t know.”

The saber wavered in her hand. Her eyes clouded, as if she was staring through him and off into the distance. He wondered if she was so new to the political situation that she didn’t understand how many cards she now held.

“The Order is your sworn enemy,” he spat. “As long as we survive— as long as this grand ship, our  _ capital, _ is under our full control— we will rule the galaxy with an iron fist.”

It would be so easy for her to take over the ship. She needed only to threaten him— put a gun to his head or a saber to his neck. Like Phasma at Starkiller, he would put on a magnificent show of reluctance and bow completely to her will.

“Unless you can fix this all in a second,” he threatened, “your precious Resistance will be slaughtered.”

She stared at him, silent. He felt a sudden pressure at his temples. Perhaps it was another bout of anxiety. Perhaps it was a movement in the Force, a mental attack.

He had thought his mind impenetrable now to any other rational Force-user, but perhaps Rey would see right through the coat of General Hux.

If she didn’t make her move in the next minute, he would drop the whole pretense and openly declare his treachery. He could halt the attack of his own volition. Once she returned to herself they could open a link to the rest of the Resistance and coordinate their attacks on the Order. But there might be sincere servants of the Order listening in on the mics, so he tried once more to lead her to the right conclusion without blowing his cover. “Unless  _ you _ magically change  _ my  _ mind, I will slaughter them all without the slightest hesit—”

Lightning.

Lifting one hand she zapped him with electric blue lightning, a stream straight to his chest. He tried raising his hands to ward it off. It didn’t matter. The lightning flung him back against the lift door and kept flowing, wiping his mind of all thought. He gave up on resistance.

Something gave within him. The lightning streamed down his left arm, through his body, and overflowed back out his right. It looped back to shock her. 

He was a perfect conductor.

As she staggered back he fled, possessed by some energy not his own. Fled into the turbolift and back out again and into some other darkened room, fully oblivious to the stares around him.

(Armitage loops)

He was not himself. He felt like a fragile construct stretched over a void, even less substantial than General Hux. His conscious thoughts felt like they were still short-circuiting, flashing in and out of existence before he could observe them. There was stuffing between his ears, a sensation he vaguely recalled from reconditioning so many years ago.

He observed himself from a distance now. It was as if he was drifting somewhere outside his body and simply watching it through a screen. He had landed sometime during Rey’s screaming. He couldn’t care.

Phasma’s messages once again streamed through, warning him about the breaker room’s trespassers, and he floated to her, painless on his puppet-strings. She was leading her two Resistance prisoners to their execution. A whole legion had been lined up for the ceremony, and Armitage fell into line among them. He was one more brainwashed droid.

One man stood out. Though he wore an Order suit, his face was covered in scruff, and he shifted from foot to foot like he couldn’t wait to get away. He must’ve been the third member of the Resistance team. Armitage had been informed of the deal: the ruffian had decloaked thirty Resistance escape pods and made them visible on the  _ Supremacy’s _ scopes and windows, in return for a paltry sum and a ship.

“I thank you,” Armitage heard himself say, “for your faithful service to the Order.”

The stranger looked at his shoes. Shrugging, he mumbled, “There’s no disrupting the machine.”

Armitage nodded sharply and shifted his attention to the two agents who were still loyal to the Resistance, though they were dressed up as First Order officers. One was FN-2187. The other he didn’t know and didn’t care to.

He stepped forward and slapped FN-2187 for his treachery. For being good at it. The strike jolted through his own body in a strangely satisfying fashion.

He was informed that the decloaking processes had finished, and that the weapons were ready. There was no disrupting the machine. He was surrounded by clones who would give the order a few minutes later even if he didn’t, so he commanded his troopers to fire at will.

He was indistinguishable from the rest. Pointless as a clone himself.

Phasma would execute the Resistance agents. She had done it last time. She had murdered them slowly and in horrific fashion, via laser axes though blasters would have been just as effective and more humane. It was unnecessary pain. A spectacular extension of Sadphoe’s old cruelty, which had so rankled him in his childhood.

But destiny was surely an unstoppable machine, free from both loopholes and glitches. Rebel pain meant nothing to Armitage. His compassion had short-circuited and gone offline.

He watched himself move to the bridge. He wasn’t in his own body. He was a disembodied phantom spectator simply observing as his body fell into blind fear. The Resistance’s main cruiser was turning to face the  _ Supremacy _ and preparing to jump to lightspeed, all the officers on the bridge were panicking, and Armitage’s mouth threw out orders to fire on it. They weren’t  _ his _ orders. On some rational level he knew there was no reason for panic. Hyperspace ramming didn’t work. If it did, everyone would do it.

He watched his body descend into mindless panic over a threat that wasn’t there. If the cruiser jumped to lightspeed, it would strand itself elsewhere in space, having no significant effect whatsoever on the _ Supremacy. _ The laws of physics dictated it was so.

The Resistance cruiser jumped to lightspeed. Like a crystal pierced at its shatterpoint, the _ Supremacy  _ split in two.

.

Kylo. He still believed in Kylo. His puppet strings pulled him straight to Kylo.

The throne room was a scene of utter catastrophe. The ceiling had cracked apart this time, shooting yellow sparks down without any rhyme or reason, while embers floated up from multiple fires. Outside its window drifted the flaming fragments of Armitage’s ship.

Rey had fled the scene. A quick check, and he confirmed that she had boarded Snoke’s personal escape pod. Kylo was unconscious but still breathing.

Yet  _ his _ Kylo was gone.

An extra throb of pain slashed and burned its way through Armitage’s heart, and his dethroned mind scrambled to rationalize it. Kylo was no longer  _ his _ Kylo. He would be even more unpredictable now, that rash Skywalker blood cut from its strings and unleashed to wreak havoc, and he would now be impossible to control. Armitage’s mind argued this was irrelevant; he had never  _ wanted _ to control Kylo in the first place.

Yet his hand crept under his gaberwool coat towards his blaster. It crept towards assassination.

Kylo jerked from sleep at just that second. Though Armitage coolly pulled his hand away from his gun, something jerked free inside him. He couldn’t wrap his mind around whatever had just happened.

“What happened?” He forced out the words.

“The girl murdered Snoke.” Kylo struggled to his feet to survey the chaos around him. Then he stumbled forward to the window, taking in the flaming wreckage of half a ship. “What happened?”

Armitage couldn’t turn to face him. Didn’t dare look Kylo’s way, in case that could hold back his own unnatural bloodlust.

“We know where she's going,” Kylo remarked. “Get all our forces down to that Resistance base. Let's finish this.”

Armitage snapped.

“Finish this?” he said, half-snarl and half-shriek. “Who do you think you're talking to? You presume to command my army?”

There had been a clear proof. Kylo was never meant for the Order’s army. If Snoke died, Kylo was to surrender himself to the Resistance, and now—

“Our Supreme Leader is dead. We have no ruler,” Armitage exclaimed. He prepared to hurl down his final gauntlet, careless of all common sense: “We could run away, anywhere in the galaxy, and no one would ever know!”

Instead came a sickening crack as phantom fingers closed around his windpipe.

It was Kylo, reaching out with his gloved black hand. In a world of black, red cloth was strewn about their feet, streaming fire. Embers sprayed in fiery arcs, like a halo behind Kylo’s head. In his eyes was a cold rage  _ his _ Kylo had only ever aspired to.

Armitage’s hands flew to his neck, wrapping it tight as if he could loosen the noose.

“The Supreme Leader,” Kylo uttered with ruthless precision, “is dead.”

He had changed. Armitage didn’t know him anymore, didn’t recognize the clear brutality in his eye. There had been a clear line from Han Solo’s death to Snoke’s murder to Kylo’s defection. It was a logical path Armitage could no longer follow.

“Long live the Supreme Leader,” he gasped out. He fell to his knees, a silent prayer for release, and let his eyes fill with tears. 

In time, the dark embraced him.

.

Armitage awoke rapidly in a sterile grey med bay. Tubes circled him, pumping the oxygen back into him, but he rapidly pulled off the central mask.

“Where is Kylo Ren?”

“The Supreme Leader is preparing to engage the remaining Resistance forces on Crait—”

“Has he left?” he demanded, cutting off the droid.

“He is currently boarding a shuttle from the  _ Harbinger—” _

“The  _ Harbinger? _ Why?” Perhaps the  _ Supremacy _ had lost all its best shuttles, but others of the escort ships had better-stocked hangars. There was no reason to settle for the  _ Harbinger. _

“It was the only ship not to sustain major damage to its hangar in the crash,” the droid recited.

“It…” Armitage gawped dumbly. “All the ships took damage from the crash?”

It defied his understanding of hyperspace. It wouldn’t be the first thing he got wholly wrong that day.

“Lights to 0 power.” He closed his eyes and tried to loop, only to get stuck in place. Kylo was mid-revelation. Armitage’s magic had temporarily deserted him.

“Stop his ship.” He swiftly disentangled himself from the equipment, pushing himself out of bed and only swaying a little when he grabbed for his coat. “I’m getting on it.”

“Sir, you were not projected to awaken for another five hours. I cannot allow you—”

“Haven’t you heard? I’m General Hux of the First Order,” he snapped back, soaking every word with sarcasm. His will to live soaked back into him. “Do as I say.”

.

Crait was an oversized gemstone of a planet. Dusted white on the top, its core was stained with every shade of blood.

Armitage stood at the front of the shuttle cockpit, painfully aware of Kylo looming behind him. He clung to his old artifice as long as he could and desperately seized each chance to stall so Kylo could change his mind. So Kylo would flee into the Resistance base, rather than incinerate it.

The Resistance’s fleet pushed out from the base in a collection of rusty buckets with engines attached. By Armitage’s first impressions, their “ships” should have done the Order’s job for them and incinerated themselves, but then the laws of physics hadn’t proved reliable recently. The crafts pushed forward, tracing bloody strings across the ground— then curls, when the Order’s ships began breaking their formation.

“Thirteen incoming light craft,” he said, forcing himself to glance at Kylo briefly. “Shall we hold until we clear them?”

“No,” Kylo answered. His mask had been abandoned. His resolve wasn’t manufactured by the filters. “The Resistance is in that mine. Push through.”

When the Millennium Falcon swooped into the battle, Kylo leapt forward and commanded the Order to blow it out of the sky. Armitage lost a shred of hope he didn’t know he still had. He sent all the TIE fighters on a wild chase after it. Perhaps that would let the rest of Resistance save itself.

Armitage glanced at the massive battering cannon that Kylo had ordered up in order to break down the base door. In a stunning turn of events, he hadn’t personally invented it.

“All firepower on those speeders,” Kylo ordered with uncharacteristic calm.

Armitage gave a command at the top of his lungs: “Concentrate all fire on the speeders!”

Now Kylo was glaring at him. While Armitage intended not to add a hint of value to the Order, outright repeating Kylo’s commands had been too obvious. He had to do better.

The Resistance’s blast door fell to the cannon.

“General Hux.” Kylo didn’t look at him, instead staring down the Resistance with murder in his eyes. “Advance. No quarter. No prisoners.”

He had no choice but to comply. He had to believe in the Resistance’s luck. The tanks advanced one heavy step at a time until—

“Stop!”

From the flaming hole in the door emerged Luke Skywalker. The last Jedi. Kylo’s last living relative. A living symbol of light and hope.

“I want every gun we have to fire on that man.”

Armitage looked at Kylo in muted horror, frozen.

“Do it.”

Now he could only stare at the untouched white surface as it split under the Order’s fire, bloody crystals spurting into the air with every touch. As Kylo clenched his fists and reveled in the raw destruction, demanding more, more—

“That’s enough,” Armitage finally said, and no one listened. “That’s enough!”

Kylo dropped into his seat unsteadily, panting with his eyes cast down. It was the first expression of his Armitage had recognized since the  _ Supremacy _ split.

“Do you think you got him?” he said, voice pure acid. The exhaustion from earlier crept back in, though it was free now of any violent edge. “Now, if we’re ready to get moving we can finish this—”

“Sir?”

Armitage looked up to find Skywalker emerging from the red cloud. Cocky.  _ Alive.  _ Now, now, Kylo would surely recognize his mistake. Now he would return to his destined path, he would thank the stars that his outburst hadn’t brought down his uncle, he would—

“Bring me down to him.”

Armitage nearly screamed.

“Supreme Leader, don’t get distracted, our goal—”

He turned to Kylo, pleading for his attention. Eyes focused out on Skywalker, Kylo didn’t even spare him a glance.

He simply waved a hand and struck the nearest wall with Armitage’s skull.

.

Nothing made sense. The simplest approach at this point was to blame it all on the concussions.

When Armitage woke up, Skywalker was dead. Perhaps he had been the whole time. The troopers reported that he was some sort of ghost or phantom that faded of its own volition. Kylo didn’t deign to explain it, simply brushing past Armitage into the base.

“Sirs?” A trooper dashed forward to them both. “Our initial investigation shows that a distress call was made from here, with General Organa’s personal code.”

“So she’s alive?” Armitage exclaimed. Though he twisted his face into a grimace, it was the first straightforwardly good news he had had since D’Qar.

“Yes,” the trooper kept explaining, “she must still be alive in order…”

Kylo didn’t react. The news didn’t surprise him. He must have known through the Force his mother was still alive, and there went Armitage’s best theory, that it was temporary grief that had sent Kylo careening.

He swayed on his feet and stared at Kylo’s back, which was taut like a coiled spring. Armitage was prepared for the new Supreme Leader to snap like an overstretched elastic band and lash him across the face. He no longer had any trust for Kylo or the whole bloody world.

Something insidious was at play.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Got questions? Theories? Come spill them in the comments section!


	14. Chapter 14

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This chapter: blue lightning, lost planets, and...an immortal cat?

**Part VI**

Impossibilities. Armitage’s life was nothing but impossibilities.

.

The laws of mathematics had metaphorically failed, as had the laws of logic. Armitage ran through his sums time and time again because this plus that should have equaled this, and time and time again he found that he was missing a variable. If Snoke died, Kylo should have turned back to the light. He had instead doubled down on unprecedented visions of empire. A careful review of the throne room audio revealed a proposal, half an offer of marriage, half a plea for Rey to rule the galaxy at his side, though Armitage had never known Kylo to cherish any real ambitions of galactic dominion. 

But the footage didn’t lie. Kylo wanted to rule the galaxy with Rey, as emperor and empress. With a fervor Armitage had never expected, Kylo wanted to snuff out the light.

Here was the first impossibility.

Then there was the fact that Rey had been tempted to kill Kylo, despite the Force’s bond between them. She had also shot Armitage through with lightning, which research showed was the dominion of expert dark side users. Even Kylo hadn’t achieved that power when he and Armitage were still bonded— admittedly an eternity ago. It wasn’t quite what one might expect from Snoke’s champion of the light.

There was the second.

Then came the fact that Armitage had turned strangely cruel in his last hours on the _ Supremacy_. He too had been tempted to kill Kylo, a thought that was ordinarily anathema to him. There were mundane, human explanations for it. Panic. Jealousy. A temporary loss of identity triggered entirely by stress. Or perhaps it was mental instability caused by the remnants of his bond to Kylo. Perhaps when Snoke at last ripped him from the bond he had turned Armitage inside out.

Yet this was a third truth that couldn’t possibly hold.

Armitage couldn’t trace the thread of logic back through the events since D’Qar, even when he sat quiet on the _ Finalizer— _ one of many Destroyers that had heeded the _ Supremacy__’s_ distress call. He had a thousand viable theories, interlinked by symmetries. None were quite elegant enough to convince him.

.

Kylo Ren was Supreme Leader now. The Order had conquered every major system and was systematically bending the whole galaxy to its will. Though still called “General,” Armitage had relinquished his command and moved to a new role outside the hierarchy, as the chief technological consultant. 

He had a cavernous lab again. He had no freedom again. He responded to Kylo’s whims with a dance of compliance and flattery and deflection. It was Dassal Prime all over again.

On the bright side Millicent had been back on the _ Finalizer _ and had therefore avoided the collision. Though perhaps she would’ve survived it anyway— Armitage still hadn’t worked out how she made it off Starkiller.

He had regressed to his Dassal Prime days. The one and only improvement was the cat.

.

The laws of physics had literally failed him. Hyperspace ramming shouldn’t have worked. The _ Supremacy _ shouldn’t have split when the Resistance cruiser collided with it. Even if he assumed that it could have, he had no idea why all the ships scattered behind it also split along their seams into neat fragments despite being off the cruiser’s path. He didn’t know of any scientific phenomenon that could cause such a pattern of wanton destruction.

“I want to know how the Resistance managed to break the _ Supremacy,” _ Kylo barked in a meeting with High Command, to which Armitage had been newly restored. “Hux.”

“Hm?”

“How did they do it?”

“It was impossible,” he said. “Whatever broke our ships, it wasn’t the jump to hyperspace that was responsible.”

“How can you know that?”

He had had this argument a hundred times, cycling through it in his own head. In his head he always delved into the technical details, the thousand failed simulations he had run on the Order’s own computers. Instead he leaned back and gave Kylo the brashest, simplest argument. “If it were possible, I would’ve done it before them.”

He would’ve eliminated the Order with a few hacked Destroyers. Starkiller would have never risen.

Unmasked, Kylo lifted an eyebrow. “You didn’t think of it, and so it isn’t true? That’s a paradox.”

“Hardly,” he shot back. “It’s circular logic perhaps, but it is _ not _ a—”

He fell off halfway through the sentence.

.

Paradox.

He had operated for so long on the assumption that he was the last Hux, and thus the last time traveler in the galaxy. It was an untested assumption.

Rapidly this became his working theory: there was another time-traveler in this galaxy, in this time, circling him. On the _ Supremacy, _ they had run afoul of each other for the first time. If a paradox caused groundquakes on a planet of Dassal Prime’s size, it could certainly split a set of ships. 

On Dassal Prime, he and his father had triggered at least one paradox together. One time when Armitage had traveled back, he had needed to land in two different realities, two loops of Brendol’s. He had needed to land in two different _ places, _in two spaces made different by Brendol’s two different sets of actions. Thus Armitage’s looping had forced space into two different configurations at the same time. Physics had broken under the strain.

This time, it was the other way around.

This time, Armitage’s actions across his two loops changed space. In his first loop, he had huddled in a deserted corner, simply monitoring the throne room surveillance and panicking. By the second loop, his mind had snapped. The second time he had overseen the capture of the Resistance spies, he had ordered the destruction of the Resistance escape pods, and he had tramped around the _ Supremacy’s _ hangar and then the bridge giving his commands. He had made uncountably many changes to the _ Supremacy. _ He had even communicated briefly with the escort vessels, and so his influence had extended off-ship as well.

And on both his loops, the other time traveler had jumped into the middle of the chaos. His second time around, they had tried to jump into two different realities, and had forced space into two different configurations. No wonder there had been a paradox.

The _ Supremacy _ was a massive ship. Anyone onboard could have been the traveler. Armitage decided to rule out the dead, which ruled out Snoke. He tentatively eliminated Kylo. Kylo Ren had dabbled in many fields and possessed many powers, but time travel was never one of them.

Pacing about his lab, he thought of Phasma. She had died the second time around. In the chaos after the crash, she had been attacked by the Resistance agents, roasted within her metal armor. She might just have been a time-traveler, with her knowing smile and the fervid declarations of loyalty that might just have been sardonic. She was dead now, from the consequences of the paradox. He might never know.

There were thousands of possible culprits on the _ Supremacy. _ The most likely was Rey. Her magic was by all accounts powerful. Perhaps she had stolen some of Armitage’s power when she got hold of his soulmate, by some warped symmetry. Or perhaps she just had more potential and greater plans than anyone else had believed. Perhaps time travel and lightning had both coiled inside her, waiting to be let free. 

He couldn’t make a solid conclusion just yet. He had learned the dangers of that.

He scooped Millicent off the floor of his lab and held her up by her midsection. Her feet dangled in the air. “Is it you, Millie? Are you the one I’m looking for?”

She gave him a petulant yowl, and he snorted. Perhaps it was General Hux’s influence, but Armitage didn’t laugh anymore. 

.

He needed more data. This was a familiar game he was playing— frightening, like a childhood with Brendol Hux as his father. He had to look for glitches in the world. Threadbare spots where the world didn’t quite make sense.

.

He needed a full night’s sleep. It eluded him. This was an unfamiliar game, the most dangerous he had ever played. The post-Starkiller dreamstate had dissipated and been replaced by a restless vigilance. He didn’t know who this time-traveler was, but the current divisions running through the galaxy made him doubt their benevolence. He had to see everything, comprehend everything, catch every break in every once-established pattern. He had to be the best he could be.

The galaxy deserved better in a savior, but perhaps he was the only option left.

.

The laws of fairness had never existed in the first place.

.

Time travel had become impossibly dangerous— even sequestered in his lab he had too much influence across the galaxy, and no wish to cause another apocalyptic paradox. Yet inaction was not an option.

To start, Armitage slipped an extra check into the Order’s medical procedures. Most of the crew had to undergo routine health checks, which included blood tests. It was easy enough to add in a midichlorian check and look for abnormalities. He searched for Force-sensitives on the _ Supremacy’s _ crew and had the data sent directly to him. Kylo never went through the ordinary procedures anymore, but he could collect data from nearly everyone else still alive.

For reference, he checked his own midichlorian count on an old analysis machine, one that had been discarded by the Order. He made sure that it was entirely offline and marked as “trash” in the records. 

Holding his breath and closing his eyes, he managed to prick his skin with a needle.

The first time he submitted his blood, the analysis gave him an error message. The second time, too. The third time he delved into the bug report and found an overflow error. When he tried to force an answer, it rounded up to infinity.

“Stay still.” With some difficulty he managed to get a drop of blood from Millicent, who promptly shrieked and sprang across the lab. He submitted her blood too. Again, the midichlorian count came back as “infinity.” Biology had never been his strong suit.

With a scoff, he threw out the results.

.

There was an official investigation of the _ Supremacy _ disaster. The wreckage had been towed into orbit around Crait— now an Order base— and the bodies of Snoke and his guards preserved on the planet for scientific study. The biologists objected rather strenuously to Armitage’s presence, but he blustered his way into their labs nonetheless.

Needles and tubes. He wanted to leave at once, but he pushed through with Millicent under his arm. It was an advantage of his new position— he could afford to be thought eccentric, keeping his pet around at all times. He refused to relinquish her.

“There are only eight bodies here,” he observed.

The mortician in charge nodded, lips pursed in boredom.

“There were nine in the room, though,” he continued. “The Supreme Leader and his eight guards. One guard is missing.”

“The footage suggests he was destroyed.”

“By the Force?”

“By an exposed power coupling.”

Armitage remembered that— armor destroyed, its hard shells and mag-coils shredded by a cloud of blue sparks. “Still, there should be significant biological remnants.”

“There weren’t, sir.”

He hummed and moved on to the fragments of Snoke’s form, all stored in separate vats. His golden robe was folded and placed in a locked cabinet nearby, along with underclothes. Armitage could have lived a hundred lives happily without seeing those.

“Where’s his ring?”

“Sir?”

“Obsidian,” Armitage said, frowning at Snoke’s bare amputated hand. “Or a black Corusca gem, or something of that nature. I remember it on his hand, after the crash but before the battle on Crait.”

In the few minutes before Kylo decided to strangle him.

“There was no ring.”

He reviewed the throne room footage once again. It showed nothing of interest, only the wild flickering of red and gold and blue sparks.

.

The news chronicled atrocities, renamed great victories by the Order’s propagandists. Scattered between them were reports of natural disasters— a series of electrical storms popping up across the galaxy where they didn’t belong. Armitage tried to figure out which of the Order’s over-ambitious technical projects could have caused them, but the list had grown too long to manage. He reviewed some of the footage and found the lightning tinged blue.

.

In a year Armitage’s face aged a decade. 

Kylo’s didn’t. Gloves on, mask off, he looked the same, but there was a weariness draped about him, knit tighter than his black armor. In hologram meetings he froze before he spoke, thinking his words through with strange patience. When he spoke he was more perceptive than ever before— Brendol Hux couldn’t have chosen his tactics better. The unnatural success of Kylo’s military plans suggested foreknowledge, but Armitage didn’t attribute that to time travel necessarily. Ordinary Force precognition was a sufficient explanation.

Kylo had grown to speak like a king, serene and certain. The fashion of his phrases was familiar, but it wasn’t quite right from his lips. For too long Armitage looked at his lips, knowing his stares would make no difference, and wondered why that voice sounded so wrong.

.

The glitches in reality grew worse. Armitage by now expected it. Bad luck was his lot in life.

He _ hadn’t _ expected a glitch to come in the form of a missing planet.

“You lost a planet,” he intoned.

Perhaps he was failing to treat the Chiss ambassadors with the requisite respect, but he saw the same skepticism mirrored on Kylo’s face. 

“A mobile planet fitted with a hyperdrive,” the ambassador clarified, her hologram image flickering. “Our primary fortress. We are aware you know of it.”

Armitage glanced at the projection of Kylo, who didn’t react.

“You require our help in finding it?” Armitage guessed.

“We require your ‘help,’” she said, furrowing her ice-blue brow, “in that we would like you to give it back.”

Kylo tipped his head to the side. “The Order doesn’t know where it is.”

“That’s possible.” She nodded. “Perhaps only you do, General _ Hux.” _

She placed odd emphasis on the last syllable.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he protested, with the advantage that it was the truth. The last he heard it was being built with parts smuggled to the Gradilis Sector. He had been a little distracted since then.

Still, her blood-red eyes stared directly at him.

.

Young Commander Pryde— newly elevated from Captain— paid his lab a visit later that day.

“Supreme Leader suggests you give the planet back.”

“I don’t _ have _ it. Why would I? We all know I’m capable of building my own.”

“Not without the Order’s resources. Perhaps you want it for your own goals.”

“Who authorized you to doubt your superiors’ loyalty?”

“Supreme Leader.”

“I thought if he doubted me, I’d at least merit an in-person interrogation.”

“He’s afraid to, General.”

“I’m flatte—”

“He says your mind’s so fragile it’ll shatter if he presses it.”

_ “Excuse me?” _

“You and your father. Both eternally overestimated,” she said, now pacing around his lab and running oily fingers all over his equipment. “But the reign of Hux is ending soon.”

“To be replaced with what?” he drawled with boredom he didn’t feel.

She shot him a knowing smile. She knew too much. 

He picked up a half-finished blaster prototype and shot her through the heart.

.

“She questioned my loyalty and, more importantly, disrupted my train of thought,” he protested to Kylo that night. “You’ve killed commanders for far less.”

“And that chaos,” Kylo replied, with a calm that hurt more than any jibe could have, “is now something of the past.”

.

The Order’s domination was complete. The Resistance was at last cornered. At the start of the fight Kylo lost a hand to an explosion, and it was easily replaced by machinery. He recovered and led the Knights of Ren into the final glorious battle.

Armitage had never understood the knights at all. Still he monitored the battle from afar, trying to find some way to still thwart the Order. He found none. Even the implausibly good luck of the Resistance couldn’t pull them out of trouble this time.

Then the Knights lost.

They were torn apart and laid low by some unknown force. The Resistance escaped, entirely without Armitage’s interference. The signals from the battle were scrambled, sensors shorting out from rain, but Armitage had a theory. Kylo had at last turned against the Order.

Armitage ran from his lab and onto his shuttle. Just after he had made the jump to lightspeed, he heard a meow. Millicent strode into the cockpit behind him, glaring at him for daring to forget her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A partial list of open questions:
> 
> Why are there electrical storms? Who caused the paradox? Where did the planet go? Why is Kylo being weirder than usual? What's up with the midichlorian readings? Is Rey evil? Why is time-travel even happening in a Star Wars fic? What happened to the Knights of Ren? What the _hell_ is up with Millicent?
> 
> If you have speculation I would love to hear it 😍


	15. Chapter 15

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This chapter: a blast from the past.

He fell out of hyperspace by the dreadnought Kylo had chosen as his capital and prepared for landing.

“Please hold. Your shuttle has not been cleared for entrance.”

“My shuttle—” Armitage bit his tongue and began again, more calmly. “I am a member of High Command, honorary rank of ‘General.’ If you check your protocol, you’ll find that I have blanket clearance for every dreadnought in our fleet.”

“Your clearance has been revoked.”

“By whom?” he snapped. If Kylo was starting to dismantle the Order from the inside out, revoking his clearance wasn’t a bad starting point, albeit profoundly inconvenient—

There was a pause. “Allegiant General Pryde.”

Three words, and yet none of them made sense. He tackled the last one first.

“Commander Pryde is no longer in the Order’s service,” he said, opting for euphemism.

“I do wonder why.”

Before it was a woman speaking, with an accent like Kylo’s. Now the voice was a man’s, drenched in an Imperial accent stauncher and more sarcastic than Armitage’s own. He knew that accent from the recordings in his old literature classes.

“Come on in, Armitage.”

He considered jumping to hyperspace then and there— chopping off the tracker implanted in his body no matter the cost. It was a useless idea. 

He flew into the hangar of the dreadnought, fingers twisted too tight in Millicent’s fur.

.

“You brought your cat.” Allegiant General Pryde—_ Pryde, _ an old Imperial officer who had defected from the Empire decades ago, who had been presumed dead _ decades ago— _ stared down at him. Armitage was an inch shorter at the most, and yet he felt reduced to a five-year-old.

He clung harder. Millicent single-handedly kept him from falling over. “The Supreme Leader has no objections.” 

“The Supreme Leader wouldn’t know proper military discipline if it slashed him across the face.”

“Where is he?” Armitage demanded.

“Sulking.” Pryde waved a hand vaguely towards the interior of the ship. “Join him if you’d like. I’ve got real work on my hands.”

Armitage didn’t dare press him. Instead he flew to Kylo’s quarters. The door opened just before he arrived.

“Leave,” Kylo said, slumped in a chair with his elbows on his knees and his bare head in bared hands— one human, one mechanical. “Leave, if all you’re going to do is whine over your damn rank—” 

“I never cared about being general,” he interrupted. “What I want is to know _ what’s happening.” _

Kylo lifted his head.

His face had been slashed in half all over again, along the same line as last time. Armitage recognized the black tracks of a lightsaber burn. Kylo’s eyes were wide with childlike terror, a sharp turn from the serenity that had largely possessed him since the _ Supremacy _ paradox.

“We have that common,” he finally whispered.

“Why is Pryde here?”

“He wanted an alliance. Another Imperial remnant under his control, allied with the Order.”

“What do we need with an alliance?” Armitage scoffed. “Is the might of the Order not enough for you—”

“He has another Starkiller Base!” Kylo shot to his feet, suddenly raging. “Another mobile planet, with enough guns to take down a whole system at once!”

That was impossible.

“He...he couldn’t build that without our noticing,” Armitage said, grasping for purchase. “The Order’s surveillance—”

“Missed everything.” He stalked forward, pressing Armitage against the wall, mechanical hand suddenly closing around his throat. “Is this all you, Hux? Has it been you, pulling all the strings since day one?”

With a shriek Millicent leapt out of Armitage’s arms and into Kylo’s chest, rending his armor. Kylo staggered back.

“Not all the strings,” Armitage said when he had regained his breath. He let his eyes slip closed. His head rolled to the side, cheek falling against the cold wall, as his arms came up to hug his own chest. “Not nearly all.”

When he opened his eyes again Kylo had curled up on the edge of his pallet with one arm wrapped around his knee. He rocked himself back and forth, hair falling unruly around his eyes. The picture of a forlorn child.

“The base,” Armitage murmured. “How do you know it can do what Pryde claims?”

“Chandrila.”

Armitage fell silent.

“They had particular thoughts on death, the Chandrilans,” Kylo said, now lifting his chin to place it atop his knee. It wobbled with every broken breath. “You could reach peace in the afterlife, but only if you got the right funeral, buried in black robes and white ribbons.” He let out an unsteady exhale. “There’s no peace for the cremated.”

For the incinerated.

“There’s hope, isn’t there?” Armitage said. He was fully aware that Pryde was monitoring this conversation and equally certain he couldn’t ruin that relationship further with anything said here, not when he had slaughtered the man’s daughter. “The Resistance is still out there, that’s what they’d say. Leia Organa. Rey of Jakku—”

“Rey, yes,” Kylo said, suddenly donning a bitter sarcasm. “You’d think we were over the part where I chase her and she cuts my face in half, but no.”

“How’d that happen this time?”

“She dreams of the wreckage of the second Death Star,” he muttered. All the feeling rapidly drained from his words, replaced by utter weariness. “So I did too. And I went to find her, and she attacked.”

“What does she want?”

He pursed his lips together.

“Ren, what?”

“I had made her an offer on the_ Supremacy,” _he sighed. “She now wanted to accept.”

Armitage’s eyebrows shot up. “She decided to be your empress?”

“How do you—” Kylo shook his head. “You eavesdropped on Snoke’s throne room.”

He acknowledged this with a short nod, too weary to keep all his secrets. “I didn’t take her for the type.”

“She’s not what I thought. My vision was clouded. By the dark side.”

Armitage thought of Rey, easily casting blue lightning out her fingertips. “What do you think of her now?”

“My mind's been clouded since those last days on the _ Supremacy.” _

“You turned her down now. She accepted your proposal, and you still turned her down.”

“She’s not…” Kylo pressed the heel of his bared hand against his forehead. “She isn’t what I need anymore.”

Armitage stepped forward. Crept towards Kylo, drawn to him still. Slowly he sat down on the mattress, touching Kylo’s bed for the first time.

“What do you need?” he murmured.

Kylo turned to look at him, black hair dangling, not quite hiding his tearful eyes. “I need answers.”

They were alike.

.

Armitage tried to loop. He couldn’t, even when he slipped to the darkened refresher. Chandrila was burning.

Answers.

The galaxy was irrelevant. The Order, too. All that mattered was the theory of everything, the few key insights that could answer the countless open questions that haunted Armitage now.

His clearances had been revoked. He had lost access to most of his computing power. He looked up what he could on his datapad, Kylo curled beside him with tears running down his face even as he slept.

Answers. That’s what Armitage was still good for. Perhaps the only thing he had ever been good for.

He found the second Starkiller. Quickly the answer to his first question— how it could’ve been built without the Order’s notice— became obvious. It was the lost planet, stolen from the Chiss and twisted from its mission of defense. Armitage accepted that and moved to his next question.

Did it work on the same principles as Starkiller?

Alternatively phrased, did he personally design the guns that destroyed Kylo Ren’s home system?

No. The answer brought relief and horror in equal proportion, for the beam from this new base was refined and focused as Starkiller’s never was. Though Pryde had chosen to eliminate whole planets, he didn’t have to. This weapon could pinpoint a single city and turn it to rubble. 

An elegant weapon from another age.

This weapon ran on kyber crystals. It matched descriptions of unholy terrors from history, from the Death Star and from the old Sith Empire, and Armitage’s stare snapped to Kylo. The Sith had wanted empires and unlimited power. They twisted minds and deceived and used reverse psychology to get what they wanted. How elegant— an aspiring empress might demur for a year, pretending that power wasn’t all she wanted, before stepping up to her throne.

.

Fifty parsecs away, a fleet of Imperial Destroyers flew out of a blue lightning storm.

.

“Pryde means to replace us,” Armitage informed Kylo when he awoke. They were equally bleary-eyed. “He’ll take my place— tactically, technologically. He’s brought in a whole fleet of his own. Imperial, but updated.”

He had designed half those updates himself.

“And his own crew,” Kylo breathed.

Armitage frowned. He hadn’t thought of that, but unless Pryde had suddenly taken on droids someone had to man the ships.

“I can feel them,” Kylo continued, eyes unfocused and drifting across the wall. “Onboard here. They’re dead spots in the Force.”

Armitage tipped his head. “Does Pryde mean to be Supreme Leader?”

“I can’t read him well, but...no. It’s another rule of two, he’s the power behind the throne, but he intends for someone else to sit on it.”

“Someone specific.”

Kylo nodded.

“Rey?”

He took too long to reply, “I don’t want to believe that.”

Armitage erased the history on his datapad, scrubbing every footstep he had left, and then brushed Kylo’s cheek with the back of his fingers. “We can’t hide in here forever.”

With a voice full of regret, Kylo replied, “Can’t we?”

.

Millicent was nowhere to be found. Perhaps she had sensed danger and fled, concealing herself in a vent or a wall panel or an already departed ship.

.

Kylo and Armitage were summoned to a central hall of the dreadnought, already lined neatly with stormtroopers. They were no longer in a position to resist.

“Lord Ren,” General Pryde drawled, and Armitage maintained that he had always been subtler in his sarcasm. “Kind of you to emerge.”

Kylo wore his newly repaired mask. A last defense. He didn’t deign to reply.

Armitage did. “Why haven’t you killed us yet?”

“The First Order’s diverged too far from its original path. You both get three chances to fall back in line.”

Armitage thought of the first-order derivative, a straight line that flew off on a tangent from the Empire’s original path. The Empire’s path was an orbit, doomed to forever circle the—

“Three,” Kylo spat. “How many ‘chances’ have we already resisted?”

“Two in your case,” Pryde answered. “One in dear Hux’s.”

The _ Supremacy. _ Armitage remembered that sinister smog that had clouded his brain on the _ Supremacy, _from the moment he had first seen Rey.

“And when,” Armitage said, “will our new empress be arriving?”

“That now depends on Kylo, as I understand it,” Pryde continued with that damned bored smirk. “Hux, you’ll want to be elsewhere.”

“I think I’m fine right here—” he began coolly.

“Armitage!”

Armitage’s head snapped around. Childlike terror chilled every vein.

“Hux?” Kylo muttered. “You look like you’ve—”

“Seen a ghost?” Armitage snorted softly, eyes still focused on a passage far behind them whence the voice had echoed. “I.” He swallowed hard and looked back to Kylo. “I don’t think I can stop you from dying. I don’t know what I should’ve done differently, I don’t know what’s _ happening—” _

“It’s my choice,” Kylo cut in. “Either I give in or I—”

“Resist,” Armitage said. His fingers still burned from where they had touched Kylo’s face. He had to accept that it would be the last time. The things he touched broke.

He turned away from Kylo and followed his father’s voice.

.

Armitage strode down the winding hallway as if he knew where he was going. He stepped briefly into a dark side room. He still couldn’t loop, so he returned to his path, walking forward until Brendol Hux stepped out to block him.

“You’re right on time,” he said.

Armitage froze. He and his father wore the same black gaberwool coat. Yet where Armitage’s uniform was black to match, Brendol’s was a light grey, with colored blocks in horizontal stripes on the chest.

It was an old Imperial costume. Perhaps _ his _ old Imperial costume.

His face was younger than Armitage ever remembered it.

“Is this your doing?” Armitage whispered. “Is all this your madness?”

It was a plausible theory. No, it wasn’t, Brendol Hux had crumbled under his son’s own poison and dissolved in an acid lake, and his molecules had been blown to smithereens by the testing for Starkiller. But it was as plausible as anything else that had happened since the _ Supremacy. _

“I don’t care,” Armitage spat. “No matter what you’ve planned, I will surpass you. I poisoned you and I dissolved you and I blew you to shreds, and I will do it all over again, as many times as it takes, and I will never fall to the likes of _ you.” _

Brendol’s face remained impassive. No glitch, no flicker of rage suppressed, no sneer. No rare glimmer of pride.

“You aren’t my father.” Armitage took a step back, reached for the sonic blaster tucked at his own hip, and shot the imposter dead.

“Even quicker than I thought.” Pryde’s drawl materialized again behind his back.

Armitage stood frozen, breathing too hard as he stood over his father’s corpse. At last he peeled himself away and faced Pryde.

“Is this your doing, then?”

“Put the blaster down.” When he simply raised it higher, Pryde rolled his eyes. “I’ll tell you something if you do.”

Behind Pryde there was a blast, and wavering blue light filtered into the hallway. Like a body caught in orbit Armitage was pulled towards it, but Pryde froze him again with a single question.

“Did you ever read about the Imperial labs on Jakku? Two related blood samples, specifically. S1 and S2.”

Armitage paused. With a groan he turned back to Pryde. “What of them?”

“S2 was useless, for all practical purposes. Worthless and incompatible with every other known sample. Fortunately, two uses were found for S1. For one, it was stripped of its midi-chlorians and sent to Kamino.”

“Why would I ever care about Kamin—” He fell silent. That planet’s name was familiar. He had read the reports when it was devastated by a lightning storm.

“To their cloning facilities,” Pryde continued as if he had never been interrupted. “Ironic, seeing how terrified Brendol was of having the precious Hux blood tampered with. I’m not officially at leave to tell you this, but you ripped my family apart. I have no choice but to return the favor. Guards?”

A swarm of troopers appeared behind Pryde, but gone was the white armor. They were painted entirely in the red of fresh blood.

“Ten years, these guards trained on Kamino. I believe they called it the ‘Starkiller project.’ Helmets off, men.”

In unison the troopers removed their helmets, revealing perfect copies of Brendol Hux’s face.

“He was a perfect subject,” Pryde sneered. “Detail-oriented, hard-headed, impeccable pain tolerance. And they didn’t even need to enhance the docility this time, it came so naturally—”

Armitage shot Pryde in the chest and took off running.

Kylo. He had to get to Kylo.

Against every good instinct he ran towards the blue. Even when the soft light turned to lightning, pure electricity crackling and rolling through the dreadnought, he kept running towards Kylo.

He rounded the last corner just as Kylo flung his mask aside and ignited his saber, a fiery beam of red sparks nearly drowned by a world of blue.

The blue lightning thickened around the eye of the storm. In the center was a spot of calm. A dead spot.

“No,” Armitage screamed in vain as Kylo lifted his saber and ran straight into the storm.

Armitage flinched, prepared for him to be shredded like that Praetorian Guard. Instead Kylo disappeared, sucked cleanly into the void.

Red troopers swarmed forth, his not-fathers’ hands tangling all his limbs, and Armitage was frozen. A final blast of raging blue swept through the hall and knocked them all out.

.

Armitage awoke in an interrogation chair, fully restrained. A cloaked figure sat before him, legs crossed delicately at the knees. Gloved fingers folded delicately around the oddest saber handle Armitage had ever had the misfortune to see.

She lifted her dark, bright eyes. Then she laid the saber aside and rose, sheer black cloak rippling around her.

“Rey of Jakku,” he murmured. “Or is it Supreme Leader now?”

“Armitage Hux,” she answered. “What is it you most want?”

“Is this a negotiation?” When he was met with silence, he sighed. “I want the New Republic back, and I want Kylo Ren.”

Pryde had known too many of his secrets— how his daughter had died, how Brendol Hux had feared cloning— and the code of the new superweapon had been hardened specifically against the exploits he had used on Starkiller. Perhaps Armitage had no secrets left.

“Both of which are lost to the void. What else?”

“You cared once about Kylo. You were bound to him.”

She began to circle him. He was even more vulnerable when she was behind him, outside his sight. 

“What else?” she asked, breath puffing against his ear. The words singed like sparks.

“Answers. Who are you, really?”

“I remember looking for answers once,” she said conversationally, now passing back into his view. “There was a cave strong in the dark side. It called to me, and I asked it who I was, and it showed me a hundred copies of myself, reflected between two mirrors. I was only one in the line. I followed the ones before me. The ones after had to follow what I did. To use your terminology, causality was thoroughly violated.”

Her sleeve brushed Armitage’s bare hand, eliciting an involuntary shiver.

“I didn’t feel trapped or panicked, though I should have. It couldn’t have been eternal. It had to all lead somewhere, and it did, to a shadow of two people. Then that fell away too and left the grand conclusion.”

She fell silent.

“Dare I ask?”

“Myself. Alone. That’s the dark side, at its purest. The one absolute truth.”

“You belong purely to the dark side?”

“I’m trying.” The words tore out of her in a rush of breath, but she had collected herself a second later. “You’ve already lost.”

“As long as the Resistance—”

“Is dead,” she finished, summoning her blade and igniting it with an elegant flick of the wrist. “By my hand, and this blade.”

It was a dual-bladed saber all in red, and its beam swam in Armitage’s teary gaze. He blinked hard. It came into focus. It threw off red sparks left and right, the sign of a broken kyber crystal.

“I have nothing else,” she hissed, suddenly pressing the blade to his neck. Sparks danced against his skin. “There is nothing in this galaxy worth having anymore, but an empire comes close, don’t you think?”

“Was Ben Solo _ nothing _ to you?”

“We were meant to rule together,” she spat, voice suddenly fusing with the raw roar of her fractured saber. “He was meant to come back, and my parents too. It was meant to be fixed. That’s what I was promised!”

“By the Force?” he countered. “I must inform you that my father has recently returned from the dead, and it’s been a most unsatisfying resurrection.”

She recoiled, drawing back her blade and switching it off.

“Was that your idea, Rey of Jakku?” he asked, dancing between curiosity and spite. “To steal the samples from that Jakku lab and raise monsters?”

“A galaxy’s too much for one person.” Her eyes were now fixed somewhere above him. “And you eliminated the head general.”

As she moved behind him again, he grew bolder: “I assume this isn’t an eternal interrogation and will indeed lead some place, but I can’t for the life of me guess where—”

“Join me,” she said, stopping to his left. “You have to. Be the power behind my throne, I don’t know what’ll happen if you don’t.”

He narrowed his eyes. There was a desperation in her voice that didn’t fit a Supreme Leader, a woman firmly in control of herself and the galaxy. “What am I missing here?”

“We can live without Kylo,” she added quickly. Armitage recognized the expression on her face from Kylo’s face, in long-past times when he had tried to play an evil villain without truly being one.

“Is...is this a marriage proposal?” he stammered out without thinking, eyes frozen on her. “I’m afraid I can’t consider those without a proper Corusca gem ring. It’s the traditionalist in me.”

He had to puzzle out what he was missing.

Abruptly she removed her glove and showed a ring on her finger. It was solid black stone. She held her left hand up before him. “Consider this.”

His gaze flicked between it and her own eyes, now wide and shining with tears of her own.

That was Snoke’s ring. The one that had disappeared mysteriously, the one that Snoke had been wearing in the throne room where they had all collectively lost their minds— him, Rey, and Kylo. 

Once Kylo lost his left hand, he turned back to the light within the hour.

Now that Armitage considered it, Snoke himself had materialized out of nowhere. He had turned from a scavenger to a tyrant almost overnight. He had worn the ring on his left hand, as long as Armitage had known him.

“Might I have a moment alone to think it over? Without the lights on?”

She nodded and turned to leave the room, clenching her bejeweled fist. She lifted her right hand, still gloved, arm wavering as if it had to push against some opposing force, and switched off the lights.

(Armitage loops)

He reappeared in the hall of the dreadnought before the raging lightning storm. The void had already closed around Kylo. Armitage wanted to follow him, but the hole dwindled away before his eyes, sewn up by flashes of blue lightning.

Armitage felt a void open in his heart.

But there were red troopers closing in behind him. Last time he had stood frozen, waiting to be knocked out. This time he ran towards a hallway on his left. As he sprang out of place, the floor shuddered under his feet. A new void opened up in the floor behind him. As the dreadnought cracked apart, temperatures dropped, and the vacuum of space sucked out the air. Wreckage flew all around and scraped his skin, knocking his blaster from his hand. Still Armitage fled to the nearest hangar.

Paradox. 

He arrived at the hangar. His own ship was on the other side of the dreadnought, but he scanned the room for some usable craft. There, still untouched amidst the blaring alarms and frenzied troopers was Kylo’s Upsilon-class shuttle.

He threw himself onboard and hurled himself into lightspeed.

.

There was a mirror in the shuttle’s refresher.

While hyperspace streamed by in that now-terrifying electric blue, Armitage stared at himself, clinging to balance.

“Mrow?”

He rolled his eyes. All the galaxy could rip itself to shreds, but Millicent would still be standing.

As she wound her way between his legs, he stared at his own face. It was pale from the lack of sun, and tinged blue by the chill and lack of air. His hair had escaped its gel, falling down his brow in sharp red spikes. His eyes were bloodshot— wholly red and yet gleaming with an unnamable dark energy— and the hollows beneath were both streaked with blood from injury. The wounds were asymmetrical. He couldn’t have that.

He smoothed them out with a fingertip and drew the excess blood down from his cheekbone to his chin, sharpening the angles of his face to an inhuman point.

Paradox. He had guessed the time traveler’s magic was like his and his father’s, but perhaps it worked on different principles— not clenched fists and imaginary walls, but blue lightning unfurled from a void. There was still more to the mystery. Matter seemed to disappear around the lightning— the body of the Praetorian Guard, Snoke’s ring, and now Kylo.

Yet the ring had reappeared. By Rey’s implication, there was a dark magic bound up in it, one that twisted her and him and Kylo and Snoke towards ambitions not their own. Rey was no evil mastermind, no more than Kylo had ever been.

There was lightning, and a void, and on the other side of the portal something more.

Alone with his blood-smeared fingers and his cat, Armitage was likely— and it pained him to think it— the galaxy’s last hope for salvation. For that, he needed answers. Failing that, he needed to bring Kylo back, to live, to be buried in black cloth and white ribbons.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The ring turns people (Rey, Kylo, Hux and possibly Snoke) evil, and the time-traveler is using an alternate method of time travel with portals and blue lightning. Here is a revised small list of open questions:
> 
> Who is really behind the clone army, the new superweapon, and the vintage Imperial fleet? What else was Brendol's blood used for, and whose blood was S2? _Where did Kylo go?_
> 
> For anyone who wants an extra hint, here are two meta-questions:
> 
> Hux's reflection turned weirdly alien at the end of this chapter. What's the deal with that?  
For years, Hux has contemplated white ribbons on a black background. What do those really mean?
> 
> Your comments and speculation have been a delight to read 😍


	16. Chapter 16

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This chapter: that highly important pun from Chapter 7 comes full circle.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter draws heavily on the _Star Wars_ animated series; all the italicized flashbacks are drawn directly from _Clone Wars_ canon! Since many of you may not be familiar with these episodes and AO3 has all these embedding options just waiting to be used, I added some canon gifs to help paint the picture. Let's see how this experiment goes...

**Part VII**

The Order’s hyperspace tracking already knew the shuttle’s intended destination— Chandrila. The easiest way to throw the Order off was to never make it there. While Armitage’s ship hurtled through hyperspace, he switched off the hyperdrive.

It was a terrible solution— he risked landing inside a sun, and he still couldn’t keep the Order from finding him through the Force or the tracker still embedded inside him. It was the best solution he still had.

With a lurch the shuttle dropped out of hyperspace in the middle of nowhere. The databanks showed no systems anywhere nearby— no stars or asteroids or gravity wells. There was absolutely no record of an eerie black hexahedron, glowing ever so slightly red.

And yet when Armitage glanced out the window, there the hexahedron was.

He began ordering up another jump into hyperspace, but the navcomputer protested. It couldn’t plot out a proper vector, not when the ship was being dragged so rapidly into the hexahedron’s orbit. Armitage cursed and checked the shape’s size and ran a quick mental calculation. The hexahedron was no gravity well, it was a proper structure made of regular matter, but there was no material in the galaxy that could exert such a strong gravitational pull—

Unless it was his fate to approach the hexahedron.

Armitage scoffed at the explanation— fate was _ not _ a scientific quantity and had no business interfering with the workings of his shuttle— but he still fell into the pilot’s chair with a weary sigh.

The ship spun around the mass in an increasingly small orbit, speeding up, and Armitage closed his eyes and braced for death at the moment of convergence.

It passed in silence. When he opened his eyes he had passed into an otherworld. He was drifting above the surface of an unknown planet. The night sky he knew had disappeared to be replaced by binary moons and constellations he had never seen. Ghostly trees grew around him, made entirely of mist, and a mountain floated _ upside down _ by the horizon, balanced impossibly on its tip.

He gawped at it all and then threw up his hands with a scoff. “Why not?”

.

His ship glided to a soft halt, moved by an unseen force. Armitage disembarked, only to be drenched by a rainstorm. Lightning clattered down around him, striking the phantom trees with blue electricity, yet for a change it didn’t frighten him.

He had been deposited at the foot of a towering pyramid. Its sides zig-zagged towards the sky— towards a starry unbroken crystal, perched at its peak— one step at a time. Armitage paused to wonder at the sculpture, a grand work of dark stone built on a solid triangular base. It was built like a temple on a divine scale, yet there was no worshipper in sight.

A strange solitude clung to the whole planet. As far as Armitage could see, he was alone. This place was a hermitage isolated from the rest of the galaxy, sanctuary and prison in equal measure. He squinted through the rain, uncertain of his next steps.

“Meow!”

Bounding out of the ship, Millicent sprang past him and slunk into a narrow opening. Like the needle of a compass, he had to look towards her.

He stepped forward.

.

Behind the main door he found endless dark halls, pristine and perfectly maintained. Symmetric engravings glowed blue on the walls and floors. Massive sculptures and strange scrolls floated above his head, out of his reach. 

Armitage was not a small man, but the sheer grandeur of the place dwarfed him. The handles for the doors were placed above his head, confirming his suspicion that this place was built for and by a larger race. Still his tiny lothcat paraded about it as if she owned it all, leading him around and around.

They passed through a room full of windows, overlooking the blue lightning storm outdoors. Against the far wall stood an empty throne, made wholly of triangles bent slightly and set askew. It was small. Human-sized.

Armitage tore his eyes away and continued to walk.

“Wait, Millicent.” He paused as he opened a door that would lead to a room they had already visited, filled with transparent circles that levitated for some bloody reason. “This is a loop, we’ve been here before.”

She flicked her tail and prodded the door with her nose, demanding he open it anyway. He obeyed his cat and wondered where precisely he had gone wrong in his life.

“I’m starting to think you don’t know where you’re going…”

He trailed off. Where there had once been an airy hall with doors at either end, he found a relatively small triangular room without any other exit. It was empty but for the rich decorations on the walls— a series of interlocking circles in radiant gold, and figures drawn among them. To his left was the image of a woman twice his height, rendered in white and soft greens. Her eyes were closed. A bird sat on her shoulder. Armitage was suddenly filled with sorrow. To his right was a picture of an aged man with a long, hoary beard.

Armitage narrowed his eyes. “I know this place.”

This painting. He knew this painting. He had seen one like it in the records of the once-proud Lothal Jedi Temple, back when he was building Starkiller and planning to blow the whole planet of Lothal up. It showed three figures, the Daughter and the Father and the Son. They represented light, balance, and darkness respectively, and Armitage had thought them fictional constructs that the Jedi used simply to make mystical concepts easier to explain to children—

He turned around and found himself face to face with the dark side embodied. With the Son.

With himself.

It was a painting of another species, twice his height and surrounded by a pack of rabid wolves, and yet Armitage knew that alien face. The bluish tinge of the skin. The reddened eyes. The red spikes on the brow, the sharp angles of the face, the lines tracked down from the cheekbones to the chin by blood. This was his own face, the inhuman visage that had looked back when he last saw a mirror. He knew the Son’s severe black coat. He knew the dark energy gleaming in the Son’s stare.

“Son of darkness,” Snoke had called Armitage in that horrible loop when Kylo had first turned on him. “Darkness of the Son.”

Armitage had dismissed it as an old mage’s ramblings.

In the image the Son offered up a hand, a gloved fist ringed by gold, and Armitage pressed his own gloved fist to it, only to be flung backwards.

Where the wall should have been, he met air, and an endless triangular tunnel filled with blue light. It collapsed in on itself to be replaced by a dark hall marked by warped lines and triangles and a teal glow. In the center stood the Father in the flesh, a real living being. He was an ancient creature, his face folded into deep wrinkles by time, and his voice thrummed with power.

_ “You carry a great sadness in your heart,” the Father declared, gray cloak rippling behind him. Though he was speaking to someone else in another age, Armitage heard him clearly. “My children and I can manipulate the Force like no other. Therefore, it was necessary to withdraw from the temporal world and live here as anchorites.” _

_ “As a sanctuary?” Someone else stepped forward to ask this, a young human man Armitage had seen in Kylo’s memories, in Kylo’s face. Yet he couldn’t quite place him. _

_ “And a prison,” replied the Father. “You cannot imagine what pain it is to have such love for your children...and realize that they could tear the very fabric of our universe.” _

The scene shifted again to the Son, another frighteningly real creature paralyzing the Father with a storm of red sparks. Then the floor tilted out from under Armitage, toppling him over. With difficulty he picked himself up again. 

_ The Daughter spoke, crouched before a grand blue window. “My nature is to do what is selfless, but my brother's will always be to do what is selfish.” _

_ “Your brother will flee this place,” protested someone else, “and wreak havoc on the universe!” _

Yet another shift to the outside of the pyramid, under this planet’s strange night sky and binary moons.

_ “My son broke the laws of time,” said the Father with glimmering gray-green eyes— Armitage’s eyes, and Brendol’s before him. _

Again, reality glitched, shorting out before coming back into focus. Suddenly the Son stood before the Father, face to face.

_ “Do not leave, my son—” _

_ “You have no power to keep me, old man. You must understand by now, this planet is not my destiny!” The words ripped out of him, raw with the restlessness that had haunted Armitage on Dassal Prime. _

_ “What you will do will destroy all that is good,” declared the Father. “I beg you, restrain yourself and stay—” _

_ In an instant the Son’s anger collapsed into sorrow. “I cannot.” _

One last glitch, and the Father collapsed, his own hands on the hilt of a dagger he had thrust through his own core.

_ “Father, no!” The Son again flickered from rage to grief in a heartbeat, staggering forward to catch his father as he fell. “What have you done? It did not have to be this way—” _

_ “Yes, my child, it did. You and I are tied together, and your strength runs through me. This way, I take your power.” _

_ “Please,” the Son said, reduced from a god to a child’s broken whisper, “don’t die.” _

_ “I always knew there was good in you.” _

_ The Father pulled the Son close. In that one unguarded moment, the human youth from before stepped forward and ran him through with a cold blue lightsaber. The Son gasped as a young Anakin Skywalker slew him. _

_ “And so you have betrayed me, father.” _

_ Tumbling from his father’s arms, the Son fell lifeless on the ground, a final breath escaping his lips. His red eyes went dark. _

_ _

Armitage was hurled back into the room with the painting. He fell on his back, panting hard, and turned to Millicent.

“So this Son,” he muttered, “could break the laws of time. He wanted to leave the planet, but that would have caused mass chaos and Anakin Skywalker had to put him down. Does that about sum it up?”

Millicent let out a sorrowful sound.

“And to add a hypothesis,” Armitage said drily, eyes fixed up on the image of the Son, “he did manage to slip out once before. Maybe it was only a second, from an immortal’s perspective, but he made it out for one night of passion. And he left a boy named Lake Hux capable of time travel…”

And a whole bloodline of cursed sons, doomed to repeat the Son’s mistakes and the Father’s. A whole bloodline doomed to suicide and patricide and filicide, to breaking everything it touched.

“You are a god,” Snoke had once whispered to Armitage. “And that is why you can never go free again.”

.

Armitage had wanted answers. He hadn’t expected to learn he was a demigod doomed to catastrophe from his first heartbeat, but knowledge was power. There was utility to be squeezed from this somehow.

“I break all the things I touch,” he said aloud as his lothcat purred in agreement. There was odd comfort in articulating this sentiment, after so many years of fearing that he had only imagined his unnatural bad luck. 

But outside this bizarre, timeless otherworld, the galaxy was splintering apart. That was partly his fault, but not entirely. The clone army and the new superweapon and the incessant blue lightning weren’t his doing, which meant—

“There’s someone else here, who doesn’t belong.”

He was strangely certain of it. An outsider was stealing the gods’ power for their own.

“But where?”

Millicent rubbed her squashed little face against him for the last time. Then she sprang up to the painting and _ into it, _ transformed suddenly to two-dimensional golden lineart. Her stubby shape turned regal, fur smoothed to clear sharp curves, and she gave a final stretch. Then she curled up at the foot of the Father. The circles all over the walls began to creak and move, with the slow shuddering of a chronometer’s gears falling into place.

All the shapes melted away. The whole room was plunged into darkness. Armitage stepped back, fingers scrabbling for the door, but he found only a smooth unbreakable wall.

A new shape appeared on the floor before him, a pure white triangle lined with intricate sigils and a glowing circle inscribed within. Armitage recognized the shape from when Snoke had branded it about his wrists. Now he could focus only on the center of the circle, where the pure black of stone had turned to the velvet of a night sky once again dotted with stars.

He stepped forward to inspect it and fell straight in.

.

Armitage stumbled forth, suddenly set on his feet again. When he whirled around the triangular portal was behind him. The circle in its center was smooth, impenetrable to the touch.

Armitage spun back around to take in yet another impossible world. It was a world of black, a velvet void dotted with stars, yet it wasn’t empty. It was strung with curves lined in white, elegant hyperbolas arcing all around him like ribbons. He himself had landed on one of these paths, and where his feet touched it white circles rippled out, as if he was stepping in water though the paths were solid to the touch. 

It was empty but for one other man. “Armitage Hux. I wondered how soon the strings of your fate would lead you here.”

Armitage groaned. “I was rather hoping it wasn’t you again.”

That laugh crackled through the air like a snap of lightning, and Armitage straightened up to face the old Emperor Palpatine.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For those who are curious, the two main settings of this chapter are Mortis and the World Between Worlds.


	17. Chapter 17

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This chapter: The Fall of Hux.

For years Armitage had watched the Emperor, staring into the flickering blue of the old holorecords that the Academy had played for literature class. The man had barely changed. He wore the simple black robe he had favored at the end of the Empire. His skin was still folded by age and abuse of power. His yellowed eyes were still frozen in that treacherous kindly look that had won him an Empire in the first place.

Armitage had two blades concealed on his person. He had skewed, unreliable Force abilities that couldn’t protect him in any way, only conduct the pain of electrocution to extra victims. His chances of beating Palpatine in a physical confrontation rapidly approached zero.

“How long have you been here?” Armitage asked.

“Time holds no meaning to me anymore,” came the Emperor’s answer.

“How did you get here?”

“An ancient Sith ritual that fused my blood with the divine power of your father’s. If I were ever to fall to my death, then I would rise for a new life in this world.”

Armitage knew Luke Skywalker’s account of the Emperor’s death, had heard it in Ben Solo’s childhood memories. From Luke’s perspective, Darth Vader had hurled the Emperor into a particularly lengthy pit on the Second Death Star, assuming the fall would kill him. 

A blue lightning storm had exploded from the pit as he fell.

“Why are you giving me honest answers?” Armitage asked. “You stole my blood when I was a young child.” 

He didn’t remember the scene. His child’s brain might have blacked it out. But it accounted for his dislike of needles, for the strange horror that Jakku’s laboratory had held for him. If his father was “S1,” then he was “S2.” 

He added, “And when I was an adolescent on Dassal Prime.” 

A shot in the dark, but it explained those phantom fingers tracing their circles on his skin. He had hoped once that those had been Kylo’s fingers. The Emperor’s short cackle proved him wrong.

“My blood can’t be fused with yours, or with any other project you’ve got,” Armitage concluded, mind drawing links at top speed. “Its power collapses at the touch. Snoke tried to use it, you tried_ twice, _ neither of you got anywhere. I am useless to you.”

The Emperor suddenly touched Armitage’s wrist. He lifted it, folded leathery fingers around it, his skin wrinkled and warped with blue veins.

“Your _ blood _ resists cooperation,” the Emperor said. “I still hold out hope for your body and mind.”

“I was to be given three chances to turn.” Rushing to connect all the disparate points, Armitage recalled Pryde’s strange terms, even as he disentangled himself from Palpatine’s grip. “I rejected one when I broke the ring’s control on the _ Supremacy. _ I assume I squandered a second when Rey made her offer. That leaves me with a third.”

“You presume a great deal.”

“Going by our conversation thus far, there’s some service I might still perform for you, and you’d prefer I go along with it willingly. Make me your best offer.”

Armitage had two blades, near-useless Force abilities, and no proof his time travel powers would work in this otherworld, outside the normal timeline. If the Emperor had the ability to survive fatal falls, then simply knocking him off a path was an insufficient method of murder.

Palpatine laughed. Then he began to speak again. “I’ve watched you, young Hux. I know the secrets you hide in your heart. Though the rest of the world might think you a mystery, you— like the Son before you— want only three things.”

Armitage shivered.

“You want peace for the galaxy. Stability. We have that in common, though the Rebellion of the old era made it impossible.” The Emperor turned and began to walk, expecting him to trail behind. He knew full well there was no danger in turning his back on Armitage. Alone in the void, Armitage had no chance of overpowering him.

So he followed him.

“Second,” he said in his hypnotizing lilt, “you have spent your life searching for freedom. The ability to travel through space as well as time. A chance to roam the galaxy freely. And third, you want power. The power— unlimited power— to get all the answers you have ever sought, and investigate every further question that flits through your mind.”

Armitage briefly stopped breathing. “You can offer me this?”

“The galaxy at your feet, as your personal laboratory. I thought of having Kylo or Rey sit on the throne as a mindless puppet, but you?” The Emperor glanced back at him as he followed dutifully. “You have the makings of a Sith Lord.”

Armitage frowned. “You would have me as...an apprentice?”

“At first,” he said. “In time, an equal.”

Armitage considered it.

He was nearly out of options. The Emperor had always held peace forth as his goal and had always ended up resorting to war to obtain it. It was a paradox that he might now avoid, with these portals to provide near-omniscience. Yet even if he strayed from that mission and engaged in wanton violence, another Sith might be able to stop him. It was practically the duty of Sith Lords to overthrow each other.

Trailing the Emperor, Armitage contemplated all this, even as they passed another portal along the path. Instead of being transparent, this one had frozen like a malfunctioning datapad on a particular scene. Its display showed Kylo and Rey in Snoke’s throne room as they both fought for a lightsaber, yet the turbolift at the edge of the image flickered. One second the doors were closed, and the next they were thrust open to reveal Armitage himself inside. The visual wavered between the two loops he had lived in his past.

Like the screen of a datapad once Kylo had made use of it, the entire display was cracked into pieces, splintering lines spidering out from the center. Armitage resisted the temptation to reach out and see whether they could cut.

He had suspected the Emperor’s influence on the _ Supremacy. _It would explain why there had been that odd mass of blue sparks, and why he and Kylo and Rey had all been driven out of their minds in the aftermath of Snoke’s death, and why the Order’s fleet had shattered rather like this portal.

If pressed, Palpatine could forcibly bend Armitage to his will. Outright resistance was pointless. Armitage decided not to test him. “I accept.”

“Good, good,” murmured the Emperor, beckoning him down the path. Now Armitage saw many portals lining the white curves. Many others were shattered and flickering, like the one he had just passed. He spied Dassal Prime’s red-black rock in several, and his younger self sleeping in his childhood bed. Some of the portals’ images still glimmered with blue lightning.

“Can you manipulate the past from here?” Armitage asked, eyes narrowing. “Things the two of us have observed ourselves?”

“I prefer to focus on what we do not yet know. There are opportunities enough in our future.”

Armitage glanced all around. There were more portals in this world than he could count, but Palpatine had already run through some.

It took paradox to break a portal— no wonder so many portals were frozen on Dassal Prime, where both Armitage and his father had looped incessantly. Depicting multiple realities at once was too much for this magic. If Armitage could just return to the real world and begin looping again and again, perhaps the paradoxes could break the Emperor’s entire supply of portals, forcing him to give up his dreams of empire or at least to leave this convenient magical sanctuary. Said paradoxes were likely to also break multiple planets and possibly rip apart the galaxy.

Still, there was an opportunity there.

He had a plan. He held on firmly to it and watched closely as the Emperor approached a portal, its surface still dark and clear. Armitage needed to keep his head and keep close enough to the Emperor to slide the metaphorical knife between his ribs, as a literal one was tragically out of the question. It was a matter of dining with his enemies. He had practice.

“Darth Hux.” It had a certain panache.

The Emperor called up a scene on the portal quickly, easily, the screen flashing blue with electricity. Though Armitage watched closely, he couldn’t quite deduce the process involved. Perhaps there was an invocation, a gesture or some other request spelled out for the Force, but he couldn’t find any hint of one.

When the thickest of the lightning cleared, settling into the occasional flash, Armitage squinted to place the scene. The hard lines suggested the Order’s design, but he couldn’t even guess whether he was looking at the inside of a ship or a land base.

“Excellent,” the Emperor remarked. “The girl abandoned it without breaking it.”

Statistically speaking “the girl” referred to Rey, yet Armitage couldn’t identify what “it” was.

“What didn’t she break?”

“A Sith artifact that had been in Lord Vader’s possession before his tragic fall from grace.” A brief sneer flashed across the Emperor’s face, dangerous as any lightning. “It was a great stroke of luck, that one as weak-minded as that scavenger Snoke was the next to unearth it.”

The Emperor’s hand flew up. The black ring flew out of the portal into his waiting grasp.

Armitage froze. “Is that— is that to enslave someone else? Rey? Some other Force-user out there…”

The words were abruptly stolen from his mouth by a blast of blue lightning. Caught off-guard, he went flying backwards.

“Stupidity doesn’t suit you,” snapped the Emperor. He kept Armitage down with a stream of blue electricity, flowing easily from his wrinkled hands. With a curl of a finger he pried one of Armitage’s hands off the ground and lowered the ring towards it. The same sinister numbness from the _ Supremacy _pressed down on him again.

“No,” Armitage gasped. His mind snagged on something— the Force, though it simply felt like his own terror— and he channeled Palpatine’s own magic, managing for one magic instant to throw the lightning back at him.

The Emperor stumbled back with a frown, swapped tactics, and Force-choked him into oblivion.

.

Once again numbed and knocked out of his own body, Armitage watched himself wake up. The ring was heavy on his finger. The magic weighed heavier on his mind. He could _ feel _ the puppet-strings pulling his body off the ground and propping him up onto his feet.

“I watched General Hux swear his loyalty to the Order many times,” the Emperor said, not even looking his way. “I am not quite as _ trusting _ as Snoke.”

The strings twisted him around to face the Emperor, straight-backed. Armitage was now as docile as any of the clones of his father.

Thinking was an impossibly difficult task. He had been submerged underwater, and reality made its way to him slowly. By the time it arrived it had been distorted. He couldn’t make sense of it.

“It was only a matter of time,” Palpatine continued in his endless winding soliloquy, “before you were wholly under my sway. You have belonged to me since the instant of your conception.”

Armitage’s body didn’t react at all but to sway, unsteady under its strings. Buried deep inside his true self protested. The Emperor had no claim at all over his existence—

“Your father missed a great many things,” the Emperor reflected. “He thought his pitiful deceptions could hide his bloodline from me. He considered it mere coincidence that the last woman of your line came in to serve in his kitchen.”

Armitage’s true self— the luminous dark energy bound tight within him— recoiled from the implication.

“And I regret that I could not clone Brendol Hux directly,” he mused as if it was all an amusing experiment, “but the failure of the Skywalker project proved the dangers of tampering with midichlorians. The results were too unpredictable for my taste. Anakin Skywalker showed me that much.”

One blow after the other. The Emperor chose these words, all his words wisely. He was perfecting the ring’s control over Armitage. It was the perfect trap. First the Emperor had swayed Armitage towards the Sith with honeyed words and promises of power, and though he had never agreed fully with the agenda he had been seduced. He had given the ring just enough of a fingerhold. Now the ring had him in its choking grip, venomous black tendrils sweeping into his bloodstream. Now the Emperor was drilling down, grinding away what was left of him.

“But now you are mine,” said Palpatine. “And I will rise as a god.”

Armitage had been submerged in an acid lake. One shell at a time, the remnants of his true self disintegrated. He would be reduced to yet another of the Emperor’s experiments, like the Skywalkers, like _ he himself _ was born to be.

It was only a matter of time.

.

Screaming into the void, he watched himself die.

The Emperor assigned him to a task. Armitage needed only to repair the broken portals. It came easily, as Armitage ran his hands around their circumferences, as he reached into the Force and found a puzzle. He sensed broken bonds smoldering like burnt-up wires. He felt flares of energy, like short circuits. He had only to root the wires out and replace them. When they sparked him, he was numb to the pain. It all came so easily to him. The cracked edges came back together at his touch. The flickering screens went dark, once again turned whole. 

Under Palpatine’s guidance, he saw all the wires, all the strings underlying the universe. Something clicked, and they all twisted at his command.

It was divine power.

The Emperor was testing both Armitage’s power and the ring’s hold. The latter was absolute, where Armitage was concerned. Though the last shreds of himself protested, they could not break free alone. They could only watch, as if glancing at a datapad, while Armitage took his place at the Emperor’s side. As his non-fathers took their place as the Empire’s sword and shield, out in the real world. There were hundreds of thousands of Brendol Huxes now. Though they had no magic, they all competed concurrently to distinguish themselves in service to the Empire, to be the very best of their lot. In its way, this was exactly what the original Brendol had done in his real life. 

Perhaps he would have been pleased. Satisfied at last.

The Emperor let Armitage graduate to using the portals. It was a matter of silent intuition that came surprisingly easily to him; his blood granted him a natural finesse the Emperor might never achieve. When Armitage opened a portal himself, it responded to his every wish. Ordinarily, portals risked scrambling the matter that passed through them— Snoke’s eighth guard had stumbled in and thus met his demise— yet under Armitage’s watch they never came close. Disintegration oddly eluded him.

Portals produced blue electricity where they opened, and he could dictate whether they raised a full lightning storm or only flung out a few sparks. Yet the Emperor dictated his dictates, and controlled every other aspect of his magic. Floating on his puppet strings, Armitage ordered a thousand copies of his father into a suicidal battle and didn’t feel a thing.

.

Pulling the puppet strings of a whole galaxy, Armitage dissolved. Right and wrong dissolved, along with his own plans and hopes. Gone was the pretense that he had ever possessed any sway over his fate. There were forces greater than him, and they controlled him entirely.

The science was the last part of him to die. He still couldn’t quite choke the curiosity, the eye for technical details. The Emperor used this, occasionally asking for his input on scientific questions, and under his watchful yellow eyes Armitage had no chance of resistance. 

Instead he chatted about whether the superweapon Palpatine had pilfered off the Chiss needed to have its kyber crystals replaced, or whether they could stand a few more months of corruption. He debated whether a hyperfield processor was really necessary for the Empire’s second superweapon, already half-built. He rambled at length on the improvements he would have made to Starkiller if he had properly committed to it.

The Emperor was rebuilding Starkiller. Armitage didn’t care.

The girl Rey was still rambling around the Outer Rim. Though the Emperor set a hundred Brendols on her scent he couldn’t quite pin her down. She had returned to the light side, the Emperor mused with regret, and it was feeding her foreknowledge— just enough to escape the Empire’s clutches.

“Can these portals revise the timeline?” Armitage asked. “She visited that old Resistance Base on Ajan Kloss, we know that now. If you go back and have a legion of clones waiting—”

“And risk paradox? There was chaos enough from your old self’s meddling; I see no need to ever repeat it. Let the past live. We have an endless future before us.”

Armitage stumbled on Rey by accident when inspecting the new Starkiller’s construction, entirely at the Emperor’s direction. She lurked at the periphery of the screen, melting into the shadows, presumably sneaking in to commit sabotage.

She noticed the flicker of blue lightning at the same second Armitage noticed her and took off in a run. In a flash the Emperor had pushed him aside and hurled his own blue lightning at her through the portal. She turned to meet it.

Up came the beam of a faint blue lightsaber. The Emperor intensified his lightning, thickening it until Armitage could barely see past the sparks. Yet she stood strong against the assault and shouted back at them both.

“Ben,” she called. “Ben, come back!”

Two plasma bolts sped through the portal. With her free hand she must have pulled out a blaster and begun attacking them. Both shots hit the Emperor in the chest and glanced right off— perhaps a matter of the Force, but Armitage knew that ricochet. Snoke’s Praetorian Guards had woven heavy mag-coils into their armor to deflect shots like this one. In a prior age the Emperor’s Royal Guard had worn the same tech, repelling shots with electromagnetism, and apparently the Emperor had as well, and Armitage was fixating once again on pointless details, reduced once again to uselessness—

“Kylo, please!”

That plea shifted something in Armitage’s head. For a moment he forgot the whole scene around him, the portals and the Emperor and everything but—

A third bolt blasted through the portal and smacked Armitage in the shoulder. With no armor to speak of, he went flying off the narrow white path where he had stood with Palpatine, freefalling into an infinite black void.

.

He expected the Emperor to yank him back up. Surely there was still some use for him. Surely the Empire still had some use for him. Surely he wasn’t consigned to spend an eternity freefalling in an endless, timeless black void. By all the laws of physics he was being pulled by gravity, and something had to exert that force. By all the laws of physics he was falling _ towards _ something.

By his estimation he would soon reach terminal velocity. He couldn’t tell for certain, lacking any point of reference. The sound of the battle grew faint. The white paths disappeared from view. They left him plummeting alone in the darkness. 

Perhaps this had always been his destiny.

Yet the girl’s cries echoed in his ears long after their sound could possibly reach him. Kylo had been here in this otherworld once, or perhaps he was still to arrive. Either way, she still wanted him back. 

Armitage had few reliable constants in his life; none of the facts of the universe had deigned to stay in their places. Yet there was one possibility that he had turned to again and again, even when it was pointless, even after it failed him.

Here was a constant still inviolate: the Hux blood had always flowed in his veins.

The ring still tugged at his mind, and it fought back when he tried to pull it off his finger. He bared his monomolecular blade, grabbed onto a loophole and eliminated the offending digit.

Bleeding alone in the dark, he closed what remained of his fists and his eyes.

(Armitage loops)

He knew what it was like to be all body and no mind. That was the ring’s special torture— his physical form had gone about living General Hux’s life, detached from Armitage’s consciousness as if all the nerves conecting them had been snipped in two. Now he was nobody. 

He was flung backwards and slammed into a wall, but there was no pain, only a cutting sense of loss. He tried to peel himself up off the white path where he had fallen, only to find he had no hands to push.

He was no body, all mind.

The world around him was what he remembered, a black void spotted with stars and crossed by thin white paths, but Armitage’s physical form seemed to be missing. Instead he was a phantom radiating heat, glowing in some wavelength invisible to any eye, floating down slowly as gravity exerted its pull.

Behind him, a lightsaber thrummed and lightning crackled. He had no time to see why. He was too focused on falling, falling towards the white path below him and then _ through _it. Within a few seconds he had passed straight through the path as if matter had no impact on him anymore, and then he was drifting back down into the black void. 

Yet there was some new power awaiting him— or an old energy, now purified. He reached for it and went springing back up through the white path, easily beating gravity. Now he achieved more control over his ghostly self, and he spun himself around, fixing his sights on the Emperor and—

Kylo.

Kylo was dead. His body flopped in midair. Still Palpatine shot it through with blue lightning, perhaps to be quite certain of his kill, perhaps out of sheer glee. Kylo’s lightsaber had tumbled from his lax hand onto the path below. It was still ignited. It still threw off its red sparks.

Kylo was dead. He had charged through the portal and dueled the Emperor and lost. It explained too much— why Armitage hadn’t seen a wisp of Kylo upon arriving in this otherworld, why Rey was still calling for her Ben helplessly from the real world’s timeline. He had died in this place before Armitage had ever reached it.

And it was the last grand revelation Kylo Ren would ever have. Of course when Armitage looped within this otherworld’s timeline he had arrived at this moment. And because his own body didn’t yet exist in this timeline, he had been sublimed like a crystal in a vacuum. He had turned to a luminous spirit, free from the crude constraints of matter.

With a careless wave of the hand, Palpatine knocked Kylo’s corpse off into the void.

Kylo was dead, and Armitage would never see him alive again, and he had to accept this. He couldn’t. The thought repelled him. He couldn’t dwell on it. In his despair he settled on another idea entirely.

Palpatine had to die. 

An ancient rage flared in Armitage. 

Once and for all he shook off the vestiges of the ring’s meddling. He came alight with a dark energy all his own. Though he had no body, he was more himself than ever.

He pressed himself forward, drifting ever so slowly towards his target. The Emperor didn’t seem to notice the phantom menace creeping up towards his back, preoccupied instead with summoning Kylo’s lightsaber. He deactivated it and turned it over in his hands with perverse appreciation. With one quick motion Armitage rammed himself into the Emperor, attempting to buy time and knock him off the path too—

He simply whizzed through and came out on the other side.

He couldn’t interact properly with matter in this form. He tried to speak but had no voice. He floated to a portal and begged it to hear him, to no effect. Panic stabbed through him, for perhaps he had been rendered even more useless than ever, but then he remembered the lightsaber that Palpatine now had in his warped, undeserving hands. It drew its power from kyber crystals.

Kyber crystals had nebulous, luminous souls of their own. This was why Kylo had bonded instantly with this particular battery, though it was already half-broken. Within a few minutes of finding it he had declared absolute loyalty to it back on Batuu.

Armitage tried to unfurl his own nebulous warmth. He reached out to it.

_ Hello? _

Kyber crystals were the stuff of superweapons. Their explosions were legendary, and even a crystal this small could perhaps do the Emperor in.

_ Can you hear me? _

A hum answered him in a dissonant chord, but Armitage liked it at once. He was at once strangely certain this crystal _ liked him. _

_ Can you turn the blade back on? _

He knew at once the answer was “no.” The saber’s ignition button was outside the crystal’s reach. 

_ Can you simply shatter for me? _

The hum intensified before going silent. The Emperor tucked the saber under his robe, briefly exposing the heavy mag-coil armor underneath. Then he moved on, unharmed for now.

The crystal was already half-broken, and it wanted to do as Armitage asked. It felt like Kylo. It had known Kylo. On Batuu, it had called out to Kylo and begged for his attention, even though it was broken and malfunctioning, and Armitage had never related so much to an inanimate object.

Now it wanted to do as Armitage said, yet shattering was physically impossible for it without some further push.

Armitage knew something about physical impossibilities.

His spirit was currently in one place, hovering near the spot where Kylo had died. If his instincts about this world’s timeline were right— admittedly a questionable prospect— his physical form would show up in the future and bring a copy of his spirit along with it. Together they would tumble out of the portal Millicent would open, onto an entirely different white path.

He called out to the crystal once more: _ Just wait for the moment of convergence. _

Then he let go of all the power that had kept him aloft and hurled himself off the path, chasing Kylo’s body down into the void.

.

It was difficult marking time when one was a bodiless entity plummeting through an endless void, especially when said void had a tenuous relationship with ordinary space and time. Armitage’s fall felt eternal.

He doubted himself at one point and tried to loop back. The lack of hands and eyes prevented that. Down he plummeted, waiting and wondering if he had just made his final miscalculation. He fell and waited and fell and waited for—

Molecular displacement. The one instant when his phantom’s potential energy was unleashed on ordinary matter.

He split in two. One second he was a phantom in the abyss, the next he was a real body above, lying on a white arc. He flickered back and forth a few more times before settling back into his bodily self. The white path beneath him quaked, massive circles rippling out under his form. Then came an ominous rumble and an ear-splitting explosion.

A paradox, and Armitage had generated the largest one he could. At the second his real body arrived here, his spirit would have to be in two places at once. By throwing himself down into the abyss, he had put a massive distance between them. It was a matter of elastic potential energy. The two copies of his soul had snapped back together. He had snapped back in Palpatine’s face like a string pulled too far.

The kyber crystal got its push.

It blew up precisely according to plan, and he turned around just in time to see Palpatine flung back, robes all up in flames. A mad smile spreading across his face, Armitage stumbled forward, oddly steady though the path still trembled under him, and he revealed his monomolecular blade and raised it for a final death blow, just to be sure.

“No!”

Palpatine’s hands threw out yet another blast of blue lightning, catching Armitage square in the chest. He stumbled back, cursing. The bloody pest lay on the floor, burning and winded and still refusing to die.

Even in this state, Armitage didn’t dare face him head-on.

He couldn’t get close enough for the kill. Perhaps he could jump again and generate an even larger paradox, trigger an even deadlier explosion, but he didn’t dare let Palpatine out of his sight. If he did, Palpatine might open a portal and escape into the real world, and then the bloody loop might never end. Perhaps he already had done just that. Simply killing Palpatine here wasn’t sufficient; the galaxy had been at risk from the first moment he broke into this alternate dimension. But that moment was now in the past, rendered unstoppable unless—

Unless Armitage could let the past die.

He had to kill it.

Against his better judgment he turned his back on the Emperor. He sprinted back towards the portal, the one that had brought him from the temple. He had to summon up a scene from the past, fast as he could.

There were no weapons, no allies he could call up that the Emperor could not turn back against him. This was his fight alone, and the more he prolonged it the more chances Palpatine had to thwart him.

Armitage asked the portal to summon Palpatine’s father. 

He could kill the father. Kill the father, and the son would never exist, and neither would Anakin Skywalker nor Armitage Hux—

The bloody portal stayed black. Armitage could guess which wall was stopping him. Even here he couldn’t access any scene from before his birth. Yet by the time of his birth the Empire was at its height, and Palpatine nearly unkillable.

To the best of Armitage’s knowledge, Palpatine had suffered only one moment of weakness in the whole of his adulthood.

He glanced back and found Palpatine crawling down the bridge, inching inexorably towards another functional portal in the distance. Armitage turned back and asked his own portal to show the Battle of Endor.

The Emperor had fallen to his death at that battle— a galactic shatterpoint if Armitage had ever seen one, and one he had to now edit. Too heavy a touch and he’d end up rewriting all of the history after it. Luke Skywalker might die on the Second Death Star. Perhaps the Millennium Falcon would never blow it up. The Rebellion might fall, Han Solo and Leia Organa might die on Endor’s moon, perhaps Armitage would never wind up here and Ben would never be born. 

Too light a touch, and the Emperor would live on.

Armitage had studied this battle many times over on Dassal Prime, and again in the old Rebellion war stories preserved in Kylo’s memories. He knew the precise moment he needed to change.

He honed in on Palpatine’s fall.

At once he restrained the portal’s power. If its electricity drew undue attention, then Luke and Vader might stop to inspect it, and they’d miss their chance at escape. Still the image came to life in a blaze of bright blue— a reactor shaft below the old throne room on the Second Death Star. The excess electricity was shooting from the Emperor’s hands.

Here in the past the Emperor was falling to his doom, thrown over a railing, still throwing out his lightning. Armitage had never before understood why the Emperor would place a near-endless pit in his throne room, but it made perfect sense for someone who needed to die from a fall. Palpatine meant to fall there and rise again in the otherworld, kickstarting the resurgence of the Empire. 

That was the link Armitage had to break. 

He lifted his blade, prepared to drive it through the portal and into the Emperor’s back, and then remembered the damn mag-coil armor. 

_ “No!” _

The Emperor of his present let out an unholy shriek and froze him from behind with another blast of lightning.

Paralyzed. Armitage was paralyzed, frozen in place as all his nerves fried. He begged his mind not to succumb to unconsciousness for once in his cursed life. He hated Palpatine, and he hated his own head, and he hated the Force that refused to let him get what he and the galaxy needed—

A force.

What he needed was a rope to knot around Palpatine’s neck and suspend him in midair. No literal rope was on hand, but there were other forces to fight gravity. He tapped into the electricity currently searing him and channeled it through the portal. Straight to the mag-coils that should have encircled the old Emperor’s chest.

He struck home.

It was basic physics. An elegant symmetry tied electricity and magnetism. Each could invoke the other. They existed in balance, each bound up with the other to create one electromagnetic force.

And according to the research for Starkiller, the Death Star’s reactor shafts were wired with Haysian smelt, the finest known metal for conducting electricity.

Reaching towards the portal, Armitage supercharged the wires in Palpatine’s armor. The mag-coils sizzled, an increasingly potent electromagnet, and as they fell they called up an opposite force from the tube around them. The smelt came alive with a sizzling electric current and a magnetic field of its own. It resisted the Emperor’s fall, physically repelling his body back upwards.

Gravity faltered.

Palpatine’s descent slowed. It wasn’t enough. Armitage had to slow him further. He loosened his grasp on the portal’s own magic, letting more blue lightning burst into the system, and he sent it in loops around the reactor shaft. It strengthened the magnetic field pushing back on Palpatine’s fall.

The Emperor in his present was already shooting him full of lightning. The Emperor in the past had begun to react to the strange forces upon him, scattering his lightning all around and through the portal, catching Armitage’s face and chest. The roar of the portal’s own lightning surged dangerous through him. He twisted all three currents and conducted them back into the reactor.

Resolute, he stood at the deadened eye of an electrical storm. Winds blew first on the other side of the portal and then on his, stripping his face and batting his black clothes. They flew thick with the scent of ozone. Even when he closed his eyes the electric spiderwebs still glowed, branded on his retinas.

Over the roar he could barely make out the sound of his own screaming.

His every nerve was on fire. His heartbeat quivered out of rhythm, whether from the strain or the terror or the electricity he couldn’t tell, and the floor rumbled, and his trembling legs threatened to collapse under him. But failure was no option. He had to be as strong and diligent and patient as this crisis required. He had to be the best he could be. He had to keep fighting past every limit.

He had promised.

The Emperor on the other side of the portal wafted down to the ground like a slip of paper. Armitage waited a moment— an eternity— until the Millennium Falcon successfully blew up the Death Star’s reactor, roasting Palpatine to a crisp.

This time, Palpatine _ burned _ to death.

The portal’s surface cracked in half and froze on the blinding white of the explosion, and the ground below Armitage gave a mighty tremble, and he winked out of existence. A second later he was back on the white path, and he twisted about to see Palpatine’s form glitching the same way. 

A massive paradox rocked the otherworld. Armitage had changed the real world’s timeline. Now, Palpatine never made it here. His second reign of terror never happened. Logically, _ Armitage _ wouldn’t have arrived here either. The two of them were both here and not here, and the world around them was still twisting, deciding which possibility to settle on—

The Emperor’s burnt frame disappeared and didn’t return. Gone for good.

Perhaps Armitage would follow him. If he did nothing now, he might flicker out of existence once and for all.

The white path he stood on fractured. He leapt forward as a massive swath of white ribbon cracked off and fell into the void behind him, taking the portal he had used with it. Tiny fissures spread out from where his feet touched the ground. His head ached as if split open.

He could stay where he was until his weight snapped the path, and then he might just fall forever. He had been falling long enough to be used to it, the sense of flailing without any support or safety net. But he had just meddled with the innards of the universe on an unprecedented scale, had made a change that would potentially upend all reality as he knew it, and there was a question he needed answered.

He needed to know whether he had left the rest of the Battle of Endor intact.

He needed to know whether he had just erased Ben Solo.

Kylo. Ben. He spurred Armitage forward, to jump forward to the next available portal. It was broken and stuck on the scene at the _ Supremacy, _ flickering between a throne room where Armitage was present and one where he wasn’t and empty black. Its circular screen was shattered, refracting light in every direction. Its jagged edges threatened to cut.

Another snap, and the path below Armitage broke off. At the last possible second he launched himself forward, back towards the real world.

.

He landed in an empty room, one of First Order make at first glance. Armitage was wearing his gaberwool greatcoat. A datapad was in his hands. Though his head ached tremendously and sparkles infringed on his vision, he began pulling up paperwork.

Paperwork. He had ordered it by the ton in his past lifetimes, and he reviewed it fast as he could for discrepancies. It was 34 ABY. He was on the _ Supremacy, _ capital of the Order. Hosnia had burned. So had Starkiller. Captain Phasma had just messaged him about Resistance saboteurs trying to hack into the breaker room. Another Resistance agent named Rey had just turned herself in to the custody of one Kylo Ren, who promptly brought her to Supreme Leader Snoke’s throne room.

It all seemed the same, but there had to be a discontinuity somewhere. Before, Palpatine had interfered in Snoke’s throne room. There had been a telltale flare of blue lightning. By Armitage’s estimation, Palpatine had opened a portal with that lightning and invoked the ring’s powers, twisting him and Kylo and Rey past recognition.

Armitage hacked into Snoke’s surveillance and rewound to watch the battle there. He had only partial angles and rotten sound quality, but he was certain: there were no wayward blue sparks or shredded guards this time.

But he might still have been wrong. Perhaps Palpatine’s meddling hadn’t mattered for this. Perhaps the ring could drag their minds into darkness all on its own.

Holding his breath he fast-forwarded to the fiery aftermath of the battle. Last time Rey had begged Kylo to save the Resistance fleet, and he had ignored her, suddenly overcome with visions of empire.

“The fleet,” Rey exclaimed just as she had the last time. “Order them to stop firing, there’s still time to save the fleet!”

Then came a long silence, pulled taut to its breaking point.

“Snoke’s ring.” That was Kylo’s voice, the same as it always had been. “There’s something wrong with that ring. We have to destroy it.”

A lightsaber hummed. Kylo let out a harsh curse.

“That didn’t work— no, Rey, don’t touch it!” He drifted off, presumably using telekinesis to work the ring off Snoke’s finger. “You pull one way, I’ll go the other. We’ll find a shatterpoint.”

A tinny crack rang from Armitage’s datapad. At the same moment a message appeared at the edge of the screen, signed with Snoke’s personal codes and sent from Snoke’s personal computer, commanding the Order to stop firing on the Resistance.

“Ben, come with me. Just stop the guns. Your mother’s still waiting for you to come home.”

Her pleas tumbled out for a few moments more, tense and uncertain, but now Armitage knew the end result. Kylo had turned. He and Rey discussed strategies to cripple the Order from the inside before they abandoned it, displaying a level of tactical acumen that impressed even Armitage. Kylo made plans to have his tracker removed— an easy task while he still had the Supreme Leader’s clearances. Armitage would grab the throne afterwards, if only to get the same surgery for himself.

The war would continue, but without any Force-users to guide it the Order would crumble in time. The battle for Kylo’s soul was over. Kylo had returned to the light and left Armitage alone in the darkness.

The battle for Kylo’s heart had been lost eons ago.

“My mother might take me back, but the rest of them will need assurances,” Kylo said on the screen.

“You’ve saved the Resistance and dumped your entire surveillance operation online for the galaxy to see,” Rey replied. “What more could you need?”

“The Order has some intelligence outside its ‘intelligence operations,’” Kylo mused. “Not much, but it’s worth taking it. A gift to show goodwill.”

Armitage frowned at that, eyes pressed closed as his headache sparkled bright. He wondered what Kylo could possibly be referring to. He had known all the Order’s major operations, had all manner of details drilled into his head by sheer repetition, but there was no one clear gift worth bringing to the Resistance unless—

The door opened behind him. Before he could open his eyes, he had been frozen in place and then smacked against one last wall.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The end is near.
> 
> If you're curious, [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N7tIi71-AjA) is a very short video demonstrating how Armitage's electromagnetic scheme worked!


	18. Chapter 18

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This chapter: their coming together is his undoing.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is the last proper chapter. There will be a short epilogue up in two days, to tie up some loose ends.
> 
> Thank you so much to everyone who has come along on this wild ride.

**Part VIII**

Armitage jerked awake behind a shatterproof transparisteel pane in a pristine white room. The angles were a hint too soft for the Order. There were no restraints on him, but a gentle white light glowed on the other side of the wall— just bright enough to render looping impossible.

Unless he removed his eyes or otherwise severed his optic nerve. There were always options.

A stranger was watching him on the other side.

“Are you a guard?” Armitage asked.

The man didn’t answer. Yet anger flashed through his dark eyes as he snapped a comlink to his mouth. “Prisoner’s awake.”

“Are you protecting me from them or them from me?” Armitage asked. He stepped forward until his own reflection came half into focus. He looked human again, if one missed the slight charge in his gray-green eyes.

“You should be dead by now,” the man spat.

“Perhaps,” Armitage answered coolly. “Might I know who I’m talking to?”

“Commander Poe Dameron, not at your service.”

“Are you with the Resistance?”

“You don’t remember me? I’m hurt.”

“Should I?”

“‘General Hugs’?”

“Oh, of course.” Armitage laughed at the memory. He barely noticed the way Poe flinched, instead concentrating on his own reflection. Trying to see whether all he had seen was written plain on his face. “It was just such a long time ago.”

“It’s been three days.”

“From your perspective, certainly.”

“From my—” he cut himself off with a huff. “You’re going to get philosophical on me?”

“‘Going to’ implies that I wasn’t already.” Armitage tipped his head to the side.

“Alright then,” Poe said, crossing his arms and stepping right up against the glass. “Twenty billion casualties on Hosnia. What was your philosophical justification for that one?”

“It was an accident. The two of us really should’ve coordinated better.”

“That was a…” He drifted off this time, stunned into silence. “Who the _ hell _accidentally blows up five planets?”

“Does that make it worse, do you think? Would you have preferred that I have meant it? That I truly had fascist convictions, that I thought it was _ possible _ to bring an end to disorder and entropy?”

“You. You’re _ General Hux of the First Order.” _

Momentarily roused from a reverie, he shrugged off the gaberwool coat and tossed it against the wall. “I prefer ‘Armitage.’”

After a moment, he ripped off the First Order patch on his arm and tossed that too.

“No. You’re not a saboteur,” Poe intoned with the horror of a man watching his worldview crumble.

“You’ve never heard the tragedy of Galen Erso?”

“No,” he repeated with a rough shake of the head. “You’re not—”

“Did it never strike you as convenient,” Armitage interrupted, “that Starkiller had an exposed thermal oscillator? That the shields went down and couldn’t be brought back up in time to stop you? That the Resistance knew, the second time it was meant to fire? That the _ Fulminatrix _ was primed and ready to explode near D’Qar, that you had the _ time _ to light that fire, that when the _ Supremacy _tracked you down it was close enough to put Snoke in your sights but just too far to take you down—”

“Hey! This war has been nothing but pointless violence, we won every fight with our own blood—”

“Yes,” Armitage hissed, “and mine. Please believe me when I say if I wanted you all dead, you would be.”

“And, what, you do this all out of the goodness of your heart?”

“There’s bad blood between me and the Empire.”

“Hey, why didn’t I guess that? Between all the pro-Empire propaganda speeches and the fact that you blew up the New Republic’s capital...”

“You forget I personally murdered the Emperor.”

“Oh, of course.” Poe clapped, radiating sarcasm. “You were a hero of the Rebellion when you were an Imperial brat, age, what, five?”

His rant was interrupted by the door. He stepped back to leave space for Rey, dressed in elegant white, dark curls spilling free onto her shoulders.

“Careful with this one,” Poe declared, now gesturing at him without actually looking. “One good prod and you’ll break him forever.”

“Unlikely,” Armitage responded. He stood straight with his own arms crossed, but there was no tension in the pose, only a statue’s serenity. “But if the two of you want to interrogate me, I suggest you do it via mundane means. Or you can just give me a datapad—” Poe scoffed— “or paper, and I’ll write down everything useful I remember about the Order. My information’s mildly outdated, but it should be enough to destroy them.”

“I think we’ll go with magic on this one,” Poe said with a gritted smile.

Armitage ignored him for Rey. “There’s a risk to you. You might get nothing from my mind and feel no effect, or you might get nothing but a lot of unnecessary pain—”

She cut him off by lifting her hand, and pressure brushed around his temples.

He could feel it, but barely. She was playing only in the shallows of his mind; the depths had been locked away long ago. Even so he could see when the acid began to eat away at her, when the resolve faltered on her face, replaced briefly by a spark of rage.

“Your head,” she bit out, “is full of lies.”

“And which one did you stumble on?” he said, bland as if he was discussing Starkiller’s daily snowfall.

She jerked her hand back down. “Ben never...did that.” 

“I need you to be more precise.”

“He never did _ that _ with _ you,” _ she spat.

Poe and Armitage caught on in the same ugly instant.

“So,” Poe said, mouth grabbed by a perverse grin, “your head’s full of sex dreams. Hate to break it to you, but you and Ben? That’s never going to happen—”

Armitage snapped. “Get Kylo in here.”

“You may be obsessed with him,” Rey said, “but you don’t know who he is—”

“I know about the calligraphy,” he retorted.

That spooked her, sent territorial fear flaring in her eyes. When he glanced at his reflection, it blazed a hundred times stronger in his own stare.

“I know Kylo’s Ben Organa-Solo,” he added. “I know he slaughtered Luke’s students on Snoke’s orders and he’d undo it if he could. Same goes for his father. I know he turned his back on the Order the second Han Solo died, but he considered it even on Takodana, didn’t he? The moment he met you.”

“You’re mad,” she breathed.

“Not in the way you think.”

“You claim you know him. He’s not ‘Kylo,’ you don’t even know enough to call him ‘Ben’—”

Armitage slammed his hand against the pane. “He’s Kylo Ren and he’s Ben Solo at once, he’s contorted himself into a walking paradox, that’s the whole bloody point!”

He had been General and Armitage and Hux. No wonder the universe had ripped itself apart around him.

She narrowed her eyes and blinked back tears. “What do you want with him?”

As if a switch had flipped, he stepped back and answered her, once again rendered reasonable. “I’d like _ him _ to interrogate me.”

Poe jumped in before Rey could, swaggering up close. “Or what?”

“I can tear apart this entire base.”

“What happened to savior of the Republic, huh?”

“That’s impossible,” Rey broke in. “The Order can’t find us, and everyone else here is loyal. _ You _ don’t have any exposed circuits that you could manipulate.”

Armitage raised his thumb to his lips and bit in with an inhumanly sharp strike. He smeared the blood on the window between them, a stain on his abdomen’s reflection.

“Run a midichlorian test on that sample,” he said, “and see whether you still want to take that risk.”

.

They didn’t send someone for that sample. Chances were the Resistance had drawn his blood the second they got him; before the Order wiped him entirely from their systems, it would help crack their bio-based encryption.

They left him alone in the damned light. Assuming they were still monitoring him via electronic means, he began rattling off the Order’s secrets.

“Your primary target should be Sienar-Jaemus. Hit their weapons factories, and the Order will struggle to recover from the loss in production. You could also hit Canto Bight’s casino during a major Podrace; half their craft designers show up there to gamble…”

As he soliloquized, he stared at his own reflection. His skin seemed sallow and old, and embedded in his green eyes was an alien glint. He looked at himself and saw only the Father.

“The hyperspace trackers rely entirely on data from the start of the jump. If you change course partway through or just fall out of hyperspace early, you’ll evade them easily…”

He had more options than ever before. His threat against the base hadn’t been empty— he could now feel the strings and exposed wires of the Force, and so he knew that one of the kyber crystals powering the laser guns was corrupted from overuse. It hummed when he reached to it. It would blow at his request. He could run in the chaos.

“This is perhaps not directly relevant to the current conflict, but I strongly suggest that you destroy the Imperial lab on Jakku and all specimens inside. I would also check in on Kamino, just in case…”

The Hux line was cursed by the ripple effects of the Son’s original misfortune. Armitage tended to find success when it came to destruction— between Brendol and Snoke and Palpatine, he was nearly as good at killing people on purpose as on accident— but his attempts to _ prevent _ bloodshed had backfired often and spectacularly. If he tampered any more with the otherworld, he would likely invoke further catastrophe. Perhaps the resulting paradoxes would rend the universe in two.

But now he had two methods of time travel available to him, complementary and profoundly useful. He could repair mistakes he made.

.

“It takes considerable power and extremely fine control to use dark energy for any mundane purpose— as in the Starkiller project. Under normal circumstances, the nature of dark energy is to stretch out and tear matter apart. In a kinder world it might be perfectly balanced by gravity, but as things are it will run unchecked without any counterbalance and rip the universe to shreds. For anyone who intends to still be alive billions of years from now, consider that your fair warning. Of course according to the most extreme theories phantom energy might manifest as _ negative _ kinetic energy and cause an apocalyptic rip at any moment, even right now...”

Armitage went quiet mid-ramble without noticing, and the soliloquy continued on in his mind, turning incomprehensibly technical. Where once he had been straightforwardly doomed to freefall, his mind now spun upwards and out, unchecked. Unbounded. He thought of timelines of timelines, extra dimensions once hidden in pockets and strings and loops. The system was his, the strings, the theory of nearly everything at his fingertips, and it only opened up infinite new questions. 

There were places he could go. He knew the coordinates where he had last seen the floating black-and-red hexahedron, from which he had accessed the otherworld. Failing that, he’d go to Lothal and resurrect the broken temple there; it once had the same painting, and so the same portals must have once hidden behind it. He could fix their wiring. He could return to the otherworld. He could jump back to his childhood and undo the Order entirely. He could guard the monastery and the otherworld forever, keep them safe from any other meddler. He could safeguard the whole galaxy as a benevolent god. He could retreat to that hermitage, that solitary lab, and experiment until he knew it all.

The system was his. He already saw glitches to exploit. He could loop again and again and optimize relentlessly, drilling away at worry and conflict and pain, until the whole galaxy had been lifted to perfection. He could slide down his gradient descent forevermore. There had been a throne of triangles in that monastery. Perhaps it was meant for him.

Where once there was freefall, now Armitage saw another way he could go. The white ribbon of a path reached from his feet ever upwards, offering an endless ascension.

.

The door opened. Armitage’s eyes drifted, letting go of the Father’s image in exchange for Kylo’s.

“You came back.”

Unmasked, Kylo stepped towards the pane warily. “You threatened to rip apart the base.”

“That was the back-up option.”

“What do you want with me?”

“Listen. Hear me out. Don’t jump to conclusions, no choking me, no throwing me into walls, none of that until you know _ me.” _

Kylo furrowed up his brow. “I’ve...never done any of that to you.”

“Yes and no.” Armitage snapped his head away and began to pace about his box; there was still a limit to how long he could look at Kylo’s face unshielded. It was the same face he had always known, though the accustomed undereye circles had disappeared. “I need you to make some further promises.”

“Or you’ll blow up the base?”

“I don’t want to blow it up while I know you’re here,” Armitage said, glancing over his shoulder back at Kylo. Ruefully he added, “That’s the one remaining absolute truth.”

“What do you want?”

“First—” he resumed pacing, arms crossed to embrace himself, hands folded soft over his elbows— “when I’m done speaking, I want you to read my mind.”

“I—” Kylo crossed his own arms, discomforted. “I can’t do that.”

“You don’t want to,” Armitage corrected. “Perhaps because your long-lost self-preservation instinct has at last returned. More likely because you’re concerned I’ll…”

When he fell silent, Kylo picked up the thread again: “You’ll shatter.”

“My mind is a vault, or a geode if you prefer,” Armitage agreed. “Locked. Rendered thus by...previous experience.”

By the last time he had shattered utterly, when their bond broke. The pieces of his mind had sealed themselves back together last time, sealed him off from the world by a hard but brittle shield. If pierced again, they wouldn’t recover.

“But you hold the key?”

“There’s no key,” Armitage murmured. “Of everyone who’s ever lived or who ever will, you’re the likeliest to find the shatterpoint that sends it flying open.”

“Are you sure you want that? You won’t be...You won’t be the same on the other side.”

“I appreciate you obtaining my informed consent,” he snorted. “That’s a first. I am informed, and I do consent.”

“What else?” Kylo said, quiet and utterly serious.

Armitage paused, thrown by the odd unease in Kylo’s eyes. “You’re afraid. Of what?” His own eyes flickered towards the door. “Did they force you here? Did they dare threaten you?”

“Not them.”

“Then what have you got to be so scared of…” He trailed off, eyes falling down to the bloody stain he himself had left on pristine transparisteel. “Oh. Me.”

“You,” Kylo agreed, caught between curiosity and terror. “What _ are _ you, Hux?”

“A vacuum-breathing monster,” he replied at once, with a calm lift of the eyebrows. “But it was...unfortunate, what Rey saw. Only a jagged slice of a story. Taken in the whole, I have no intention of hunting you or causing you any unnecessary pain.”

He could have. He could have forced his way back into the otherworld and stolen Kylo through a portal and kept him.

“You want me to break into your head, but for what purpose—”

“If I turn monstrous at your touch, then you have leave to put me down at once; use your best judgment. What feels more likely though is that I’ll slip into catatonia or a comatose state, no harm to anyone but myself.”

“I don’t understand—”

“You will,” Armitage continued, words speeding up as he snapped back to the ground. “And in that case, I want you to read it all. Everything in my mind, start to end to start, I promise there’s a logic to unite it all. It’s all real, in its way.”

Kylo stood apart from him, lips parted slightly in his confusion. Armitage’s eyes lingered a heartbeat too long on those lips.

“After that, I’d like you to kill me.”

“You— _ what?” _

“I’m not what you need,” he breathed, eyes going hazy. “Not anymore.”

“Why _ me?” _

“Self-indulgence. Dispose of the remains entirely; I suggest cremation or dissolution.”

There was a self-indulgent symmetry to it, one that already stole Armitage’s breath away. The Son’s heir, slain by the heir of Anakin Skywalker. History cycling, one bloodline falling as the other rose.

Taking a sudden step forward, Kylo demanded, “Why? Why are you doing this?”

“Because there is only one question I still must have answered,” he replied, raising one finger. “Because I finally have a choice in my path and I choose you.” He raised another. “Because I was the one who found my grandfather hanging from the old chandelier, after one too many nights at the sabacc table. He hadn’t lost all the winnings from his youth yet, but the point remained. Quit on a victory. Don’t let the family luck catch up to you.”

He lifted the third finger and then unfurled his whole hand to gently brush the transparisteel, where he saw Kylo’s face.

“You promise this’ll…” Kylo pursed his lips and inhaled fast. “This’ll make sense to me on the other side?”

“I think it will.”

Kylo went silent, taking a moment to recover. “Because right now, you’re giving Snoke and Luke Skywalker a run for their money on the crypticness.”

“Fair enough.” He laughed at the accusation. “How’s this: I got into the universe’s breaker room. I wish I was a dedicated power breaker. I rather suspect I’m a now-blown fuse. I performed an experiment and broke a circuit and got most of my results, but there’s one last datapoint that needs collecting.”

“That...wasn’t particularly illuminating.”

“Get used to it. The contents of my head tend to run in that vein.”

“Excellent,” Kylo said wryly.

“That’s my last condition. Don’t go into the universe’s breaker room. As far as you can, keep _ everyone _ out of the breaker room.”

“Or what?”

“Open my mind, and you should see.”

Kylo tilted his head to the side.

“If this is a trick,” he warned, “if you’re planning to get in my head and force me into...anything, know that I can crush you.”

Armitage snorted. “You wouldn’t even have to try. Oh, and one more thing?”

“Another promise?”

“This one’s just a request. Try to find your happiness. Don’t get mind-controlled by any more wrinkled-up mages. When the Force gives you a connection to a soulmate, treasure it.”

“How did _you_ know about that?”

Armitage quirked an eyebrow, a small mystic smile playing on his lips. Then he moved to sit down on the floor, tucked into the corner of the cell, and waited.

Kylo lifted his hand and reached towards him.

.

It was quick in the end. A burst of hurt like a string snapping, followed by a painless floating. The final question was still clear: when Armitage altered the Battle of Endor, had he altered Kylo too? His names were the same; his face was the same, but Armitage had to observe his mind once more.

He had given up absolute power to know Kylo once more.

When they had first been connected by the Force, Kylo’s mind seemed like a forest at nighttime, a maze of tangling green paths where a wanderer might lose himself forever. Though the shadows had lightened as if dawn was breaking somewhere beyond the canopy, the trees and the paths and the mist in the air were just as Armitage remembered.

Kylo’s soul was untouched, just as he remembered.

The relentless logical voice in Armitage’s head fell quiet for good.

Though a phantom, he was still grounded for now, both feet pulled firmly to the ground. He chose his own path and ran forth in forest, darting in linear fashion through the mist. The wind whipped his hair. Rocks rolled soft under his feet. He was all sensation.

.

He flickered back into existence. There was a crack in the transparisteel wall. Kylo had come behind the cell wall with him.

“I know this place. Dammit, Armitage, I knew _ you,_ we _ could’ve been...” _

Armitage didn’t hear him, gaze sliding down to Kylo’s hands, which were grounding him, gentle around his wrists. Now there was a calligraphy brush between Kylo’s fingers. A slip of paper torn from an ancient book— a mystic book, perhaps Sith, perhaps Jedi— lay beside them both—

.

The forest. A clearing, and there was a blazing sunrise creeping through the lace of leaves. Armitage arrived at a stream splitting the forest in two and paused at the riverbank to taste the water, dipping a finger in. It was salt on his tongue, and still the trees could draw on it, could thrive tall and vibrant. Paradox. Armitage chuckled, voice fading fast into the foggy embrace, and dropped down to sit on the shore, phantom fading slowly into gray—

.

A flicker. Flickering candlelight on the walls of the cell, glowing upon triangles and circles in delicate brushstrokes, painted around Armitage’s wrists. An elegant red string flowed from his wrist, pouring itself out from a needle and into a tube like ribbon, wrapping around his fingers, wrapping around Kylo’s fingers and into the veins of _ Kylo's _ wrist, and Kylo opened those lips to speak: “I’ll come back for you, sweetheart, I promise.”

Kylo was speaking to someone else, a girl crying somewhere close to them and yet impossibly distant, and Armitage’s mind was fading—

.

_ Can you hear me, Armitage? _

The fight was over—

.

The red string was gone. Kylo was gone. Armitage bled alone and openly in a cell gone dark, pouring out what little remained of his useless blood— already too little to keep him alive. The cell walls had been spattered. The pristine cell floor was soaked with it. 

There was a crack in the transparisteel cell wall. Kylo was far away, visible on the other side of the wall but still so distant.

A slow death by blood loss wasn’t quite what Armitage had wanted. A lonely death wasn’t what he had wanted, but there was no fighting it anymore—

.

_ No, Armitage, I’m here. I fixed our bond, I listened, I kept the promises but you’re not the only one who can find a loophole. We’re bound by blood, and we’re bound in our minds again— _

On the shore Armitage seeped into the forest’s mists, wisping away one shell at a time.

_ I never wanted you to be alone, loneliness kills so fast and do you hear me, can you hear me? _

He remembered hearing Kylo, that first time.

_ And it’s too much to ask but I need something from you to hold onto. I promise you, you were so good and we’re so close — _

There had been a beginning to hold on to in a time long lost.

_ You’re not alone, do you hear me? I promise you that. We never had to be. Your blood was useless but not to me, and if only there weren’t all these damn walls in the way- _

Armitage flickered to a body gone limp on a cell floor and back again to his vaporous forest ghost.

_ It’s not rational. It’s not the way it worked for you, but I have to know: do you still believe in me? _

Kylo was the only thing he had believed in for a long time.

_ I’ll fight through anything but I can’t get through without hope, and just show me something if you still believe it, any sign if you still think we could’ve been happy— _

A sign?

Armitage had nothing left. His mind was gone, and his voice and limbs too. He had burnt out, burnt away everything else but his core. He was a dying star, the remnants of a stellar core on a path to cold nothingness.

Yet in a binary star system, a dying star might steal sparks from the living sun that still pulled it close. This time, gravity was on his side. Kylo needed his light.

_ Any sign, Armitage. I’m alone in the dark and something’s still tying me down, I just need a push and you just need a little more time— _

On this loop, he was out of time.

Armitage’s soul collapsed, then burst outwards in a final electric supernova, a white lightning bolt that reached all the way to the forest sky. He left only a trail of smoke.

.

In a cold dark bloody cell, a final breath escaped Armitage’s lips.


	19. Chapter 19

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter: perhaps "epilogue" is the wrong word for this chapter. 
> 
> How about "prologue"?

**Part IX**

(Kylo loops)

On a lakeshore on Dassal Prime, a young man sits, wrapped in foggy lace. In his dreams he has never sensed any touch, any presence but his own. In his mind he now tries to resolve a system of equations, only to find it underdetermined with infinitely many solutions. Perhaps he ought to be thinking instead of the new laser his father wants designed. Perhaps he should be working on the new ship schematics he promised. He dismisses those thoughts. They drift out of his mind and are replaced by a familiar longing. He peers into the mist and waits for a degree of freedom of his own.

For years he has waited by the mirrored surface of this acid lake, waiting for someone to join him in his loneliness. In past years he dreamed of a towering hero in gleaming armor, a grand dark knight out of Arkanis’s ancient myths…

A black-haired boy half his height saunters out of the mist and steps up to his side. Then he scrunches up his mouth— a huge mouth, endearingly out of proportion with the rest of his face— and reaches out with his mind.

_ How many times have we already had this conversation_?

His mind’s voice— dark and deep— speaks of an older soul.

Armitage presses one hand to his own mouth, as if that can hide the sudden grin. _ Twice. _

_ Ben Solo, nice to meet you. _

_ A pleasure. I’m Armitage Solo. _

Armitage raises an eyebrow, waiting to get a rise out of him. Ben simply shrugs with a glimmer of mischief in his eyes.

_ You will be...one way or the other_.

Though Armitage covers his mouth entirely, his smile is brilliant.

_ Two times, and you still haven’t taken me up on my offer. First question: how far back does your loop go now? _

_ I’ve landed a week back both times, _ replies Armitage. _ 15:14, Galactic Standard Time, no offset. _

_ That’s exactly where I landed when _ I _ looped! _

_ I know_. Armitage’s mind warms with humor. _ It’s a new wall for me. Is that how the time travel is for you, like you’re being slingshotted into walls? _

Ben reflects on it. _ No. It felt like a sprint upwards. I couldn’t start until I was full of hope— until you _ gave me _ hope, a giant burst to warm up my whole world. And I could have chosen to stop at any point or keep going, but the longer I went the more difficult it got. I think I can’t ever make it past my birthday. _

_ Sounds like the dichotomy paradox. Maybe you’re running up against some sort of asymptote… _

_ Anyone ever complimented your asymptote? _

Armitage shoots him a scowl. 

_ You’re not allowed to say that, _ he chides. _ You’re a child now! _

_ First of all, I didn’t say anything. Second, I didn’t say a damn thing out loud, and finally, I’m no kid. I’ve got an adult’s sense of humor and nowhere to put it. _

Armitage scoffs. _ You have a teenage boy’s sense of humor. _

_ And you’re a teenage boy right now, so you can’t complain. _

Armitage replies by theatrically rolling his eyes.

_ Two loops, and you still haven’t said yes. What’ve I been doing wrong? _

_ You’ve done nothing wrong, _ thinks Armitage. _ I don’t think you have it in you. _

_ I’m going to enjoy your optimism while it lasts, _comes Ben’s wry response.

_ The first time, I thought perhaps it was a dream. Or a trick. A spy sent by my father to test me somehow. You said I should take some time for myself and research whatever I needed to. If the story you told me was true, I predicted I’d find a new wall in the timeline, right where your adult self jumped back into your childhood. _

_ You had that right. _

_ I did indeed. The second time we met, I wound up needing to do even more research, because _ you _ tried to seduce me to the dark side. _

_ I...what? _

_ Too soon for that joke? _

_ Yes! _

_ It wasn’t all that far off, _ Armitage continues, smile now skewed into a smirk. _ You tried to dazzle me with opportunities. Even if I can’t have a massive army or a superweapon because I’m apparently irresponsible with those, you promised me access to all the labs I could want— _

_ My mother has connections; we can get you building things that don’t murder people for a change and you might even enjoy it. _

_ You also promised me all the space travel I could wish for— _

_ Anywhere, I’ll fly you anywhere, there’s this bar on Batuu we could have fun at...in about ten years. Dammit. _

_ —and the throne of Birren. _

_ I...I was contemplating that, yes. You have potential as a leader, especially when you’re not trying to sabotage your own side, and half of Birren's settlers are from Arkanis and they’d love to have you representing their interests— _

_ Except_, Armitage interjects, _ the half of the settlers currently in charge are all from Alderaan, and I checked the rules. There’s no way for an Arkanisian to get that throne without marrying into one of Alderaan’s noble houses. _

Though they’re both facing forward towards the lake, the smirk on Ben’s face now perfectly mirrors Armitage’s. _ That won’t be an obstacle. _

Armitage breathes out, a chuckle that shifts into a hum. _ You _ really _ think we’re soulmates, then? _

For a moment they stand in silence.

_ Here’s what I know, _ Ben begins. _ Your magic is tied to my destiny. Your blood was declared incompatible with every system, but I succeeded on the transfusion ritual— _

_ Didn't I end up dead? _

_Uh. Ignore that part, I mis-measured. Badly._ He hastily continues, _The point is no one else could get a damn thing from you. Only me. Also, this conversation we spark up every time? The way we immediately fall into each other’s pockets? Not normal._

_ What else is there to this story? _

Ben glances over. Their eyes meet, misty green-gray and warm brown.

_ I don’t want to strongarm you. Your father’s done enough of that for several lifetimes. _

_ I… _ Armitage fidgets, shifting his weight from a single foot to both, his thoughts unsure for the first time. _ I appreciate that, but I prefer to have all the relevant information. _

_ That you do, _ Ben observes, far more steadily. _ Fine. Did you look up the Ones on Lothal, the Father and Daughter and— _

_ The Son, yes. The origin of the Hux magic. _

_ And the Hux curse. _

_ So you say. _

_ It’s real, _ Ben remarks. _ Darkness all the way up the bloodline, all the way up the family tree. And maybe you’d survive a little dark, but the sheer amount of bad luck seems… _

_ Excessive? _

_ Right. _

_ Then why would you want me near you? _ Armitage asks, a thready whisper. _ Perhaps my future self had the right idea, just eliminate me and my father now and save the galaxy the heartache— _

_ No. No! See, there was a prophecy that Anakin Skywalker was the Chosen One, he’d bring balance to the Force, and _ he _ did it by getting all three of the gods killed off. But there was a loophole, Armitage. There was another path he could’ve chosen. _

_ What path? _

_ Love, _ Ben answers simply. _ That was why they sought him out in the first place. They wanted to adopt him. The Son’s nature was to shatter everything he touched, but if Anakin had joined them and stepped into the Father’s role, if the Ones and the Skywalkers had been tied together as a family? Their love would have been a natural, equal counterbalance. _

_ Are you...are you hypothesizing that I can circumvent the curse by becoming a Skywalker? _

_ Yes. I checked with Anakin’s ghost, _Ben reports, more than a little smug.

_ I know I’m their heir and you’re Anakin’s, but are you certain this loophole will still work for us, all these generations down? _

_ There’s only one way to find out. Look_. Ben steps forward and around to look straight up at Armitage. _ Your father’s been hurting you, maybe more than you know, but I’ll break his head as badly as I need to to make him stop tracking you. You can leave. You killed Palpatine, Luke and I killed Snoke and his ring yesterday, we don’t owe the Empire anything. We’ve already saved the galaxy, we don’t have to anymore. We just need to keep from breaking anything new, and we need to...be ourselves. _

_ And how does one achieve that last part? _ Armitage asks wryly.

_ I don’t know_, Ben admits. _ I never worked it out in my last life, and time travel only adds to the complexity, but we can test our hypotheses and work this out together. _

_ You’re likening it to a research project. _

Ben chuckles. _ I knew that’d get you_.

_ Your parents will be fine with me joining you? _

_ I...I’m a thirty-year-old in a child’s body and I cry every time I see my father because I vividly remember killing him. I think they have bigger concerns than the two new kids I brought home. _

_ Two? _

_ The next stop. There’s a newborn baby on Jakku right now, and I promised I’d be her big brother. _

_ That doesn’t complicate matters at all, _ Armitage observes with a snort.

_ We might also pick up a cat at some point. You don’t get to name it. _

He stares down at Ben and shakes his head, caught between laughter and awe. _ Are you sure about all this? _

_ There's only one thing I’m sure of. You’re tied at the end of my string, and I’m tied at the end of yours. _

Armitage surveys the acid lake one last time before making his choice and striding away. _ Which way to the Millennium Falcon? _

_Keep going. It’s straight in front of you,_ _just outside the fog. _Ben darts forward to catch up, taking his place beside Armitage. _Come on. Let’s get out of here._

(The Beginning)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> To everyone who read to the end, thank you so, so much! Stop by and leave a comment if you'd like, I will happily flail about these boys with you 😍

**Author's Note:**

> [I have a moodboard for this fic on my tumblr!](https://chekovs-turbolaser.tumblr.com/post/189457854381/tied-on-a-string-indeed-general-hux-time)
> 
> Many thanks to the Reyux discord and the friends from outside this fandom who have supported me through this endeavor!


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